For
the past several months the world's attention has been fixated on
events unraveling in Ukraine. The past several weeks in particular have
been a whirlwind of historic developments that have once again brought
the world to the precipice of a world war. The reader most probably may have
already heard a lot about the crisis in Ukraine. For the past several
weeks there have been a steady stream of so-called experts, analysts and political pundits
throughout Western news media expressing their views. With very few
exceptions, men such as Patrick Buchanan, Stephen Cohen and Stephen Walt, the analysis put forth by a vast majority
of the talking-heads have been utterly simplistic, hypocritical,
dangerous, hysterical, misleading, false, biased and Russophobic.For what it's worth, on the eve of a very historic referendum in Crimea and growing tensions
in eastern Ukraine, the following is my take on the worst crisis we
have seen between Moscow and the West since the Cuban missile crisis in
1962.When
the Soviet Union began showing signs that it was collapsing in the late
1980s, Washington was already looking forward to being the world's one
and only superpower. There was even some discussion in Washington at the
time on how to stop the rise of a "new Byzantium" (union of Christian
Orthodox states) from the ashes of the Soviet Union. Needless to say, the Russian nation was their main focus. Simply put, nations that made up the Soviet Union were simply unprepared for what awaited them in the post-Soviet world.
With their world entirely shattered a second time in less than one century, not
only did the promises of democracy and capitalism prove illusive, it was
soon discovered that the new world order led by Anglo-American-Jews did
not look favorably upon most former Soviet nations. There was not after all going to be an age of brotherhood amongst nations, naively believed by many in former Soviet society. Russians
as well as other former Soviet nations soon discovered that political
ideologies and economic models fiendishly peddled by the victorious West were in
fact toxic for their newly independent homelands. Russians in particular were amongst the hardest hit by the post-Soviet chaos.Simply put, with the Soviet Union no longer around to stop them, Western powers have felt free to pursue an imperial agenda across the world for over twenty years.It
should therefore come as no surprise that Western powers have been
actively conspiring against the Russian Federation ever since its
creation back in 1991.It
is now well known that Western powers (via their proxies in Saudi
Arabia and Pakistan) had a hand in the Islamic insurgency in Russia's
vulnerable underbelly. It is now well known that Western-backed
Jewish oligarchs in Russia plundered the nation's wealth and national
assets throughout much of the 1990s. It is now well known that Western
powers have been actively pushing NATO and EU deeper-and-deeper into
Russian zones of interest after initially promising Moscow they would
not do so. It is now well known that Western meddling fomented color revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia in 2004 and 2005 respectively. Moreover,
Western powers have been trying to make inroads
into Armenia and Azerbaijan. Western powers
have been surrounding Russia with military installations. Western powers
in Europe have been attempting to setup missile defense stations
against Russia. Western powers have been persistently ridiculing,
chastising and slandering the Russian nation and
President Vladimir Putin. Finally, Western powers have been funding all
kinds of
subversive groups throughout the Russian Federation. The West's long-term agenda has been to push military
assets and allied buffer nations - via NATO and EU - deep into zones traditionally
considered part of Russia; weaken Russian
authority west of the Urals by promoting sociopolitical unrest and
encouraging separatist movements; force Russian officials to trade with the West within a Western economic structure and under Western terms; sabotage the Customs Union and CSTO, Russia's answer to the European Union and NATO respectively.Moscow
put up with a lot of this during the 1990s - including the NATO bombing
and subsequent partitioning of an allied Serbia - simply because it was
to weak to resist.But
things had already begun to change by the first few years of the new
century. Soon after coming into office in 2000, Russian President
Vladimir Putin was able to rein in Russia's Western-backed Jewish
oligarchs, crush
the Islamic rebellion in Chechnya and nationalize Russia's number one
source of revenue: its oil and gas production and distribution. With
money thereafter flowing into Russian state coffers, President
Putin embarked upon an ambitious plan to modernize the Russian state,
rearm the Russian military and reclaim territories considered Moscow's
zones of influence. Therefore, when Western powers brought Tbilisi close to joining NATO in 2008,
thereby crossing a Kremlin red line, Moscow showed the world that it was now willing to
resort to violence to protect its national interests. Moscow's unexpected response in Georgia came as a shock to the West, but Western designs against Russia nevertheless continued.A new threshold was crossed several months ago when
Ukrainian President Yanukovych announced his decision to abandon Kiev's
Western course and join Russia's Eurasian Union. As expected, western
Ukrainians reacted harshly to the unexpected pivot and took to the
streets in substantial numbers. Seeing an irresistible opportunity to manipulate events,
Western powers began actively encouraging political unrest. The
intention was to shift Ukraine, the historic cradle of the Russian nation
and a nation that hosted the Russian Black Sea fleet, back away from
Russia. Faced
with a growing opposition and violence in the streets, President
Yanukovych proved weak and incompetent. He was eventually forced to flee
Kiev in late February, abandoning political power to radically
pro-Western activists. Now, a new and more critical red line was thereby
crossed by the West.For more information on the crisis in Ukraine, please revisit my previous two commentaries -

Western
powers have done their best for the past twenty years to provoke
Moscow, with the latest one in Ukraine being the most audacious in my
opinion. But the
major difference between this Western push into Russian zones of
influence and
previous ones was essentially the timing. This isn't the 1990s. This
isn't 2004. This is
coming at a time when Russian power and influence has been on the rise
throughout former Soviet space and beyond. They have provoked Moscow
right on Russia's doorstep, in a nation that Russians consider a
historic part of Russia, and during a time when the Bear has been awake.What did they expect Russia to do?To better understand the mindset in the Kremlin these days, just ask yourselves this question:
How would Washington have reacted, if foreign powers (say Russia or
China) were provoking
serious political unrest and organizing anti-US movements in Mexico or
Canada? Give the above some serious consideration and then consider
this: When they used Western money, Western mass media, Western organizations and assassins (probably also Western) to assist anti-Russian thugsto take power in a strategically important nation long recognized to be within the Russian zone, what did they expect Russia to do?They
surely knew that Ukraine was a very strategic piece of real-estate that
Russia would not give up without a major fight. They surely knew that
Russia held all the cards - financial, economic and military - in
the
region to make Western provocations very costly for them. They surely
knew this was no longer the 1990s. They surely recalled what Moscow did
in Georgia back in 2008. They surely recall how hard Moscow fought to
have Yanukovych elected president in 2010. They surely saw in Syria how
seriously Moscow
has been taking geostrategic matters. Therefore, what they should have
known - but they
somehow didn't - was that this was an opportunity the kind of which
Moscow
understood comes around only once in a long while.Faced with open aggression and growing audacity by Western powers on its doorstep, Russia had to make a grand stand. Moscow had to make a big show if only to discourage further Western inroads into its space.Now,
one of the most beautiful sights I have seen in recent years has been
balaclava wearing Russian troops gracing the Crimean peninsula.A historic day in Russia

As
of this writing, the Crimean peninsula has been placed fully under
Russian protection by large numbers of very disciplined yet unidentified
military units. Like a finely-tuned machine, thousands of "pro-Russian
forces" have
methodically secured vital national infrastructure, military
installations and border crossing points throughout the peninsula.
Ukrainian troops stationed in the region have either switched sides,
been evicted or confined to their bases or ships. Ukrainian military
assets have been confiscated. A number of self-defense
units pledging allegiance to Russia have come into existence. Russian
flags have replaced Ukrainian ones.

After a sixty year separation, and despite ambiguous threats from the
West, on March 16, 2014, Crimeans overwhelmingly voted for reunification with the
Russian Federation.And merely two days later, on March 18, Moscow officially recognized the Crimean people's wish for reunification with Mother Russia -

The
historic speech President Putin gave on March 18 in the Kremlin is
arguably his most pivotal, but not because it heralded the start of a
new rivalry between Russia and the West as claimed by some Western
political observers. It can
be argued thatCold War IIbegan back in 2007 when President Putin
spoke these words at a public appearance in Germany -

“Today
we are witnessing an almost uncontained hyper use of force –
military force – in international relations, force that is plunging
the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts. As a result we do
not have sufficient strength to find a comprehensive solution to
any one of these conflicts. Finding a political settlement also
becomes impossible. We are seeing a greater and greater disdain
for the basic principles of international law. And independent
legal norms are, as a matter of fact, coming increasingly closer
to one state’s legal system. One state and, of course, first and
foremost the United States, has overstepped its national borders
in every way.”

President Vladimir Putin at the Munich Conference on Security Policy (February 11, 2007)

Sooner
thereafter this speech in Germany, we began seeing Moscow become more
proactive in international affairs as a counterbalance to the political
West. In my opinion, President Putin's historic speech in the Kremlin on
March 18, 2014 was significant precisely because it signaled the birth
of a new world order. Coming on the heals of Russia's historic defense
of Syria, during which political observers noted Russia'sleadershiprole, events in Ukraine and President Putin's bitingwords in the Kremlin on March 18 have vividly revealed to the global community that the Anglo-American-Jews are no longer omnipotent.

Finally, after over
two decades of unipolarity in global affairs, a multipolar world is
born. Finally, after over two decades of ultra-liberal decadence and a
global cultural decline as a result of Americanization, Globalization and Western pop
culture, a traditional Christian power
is back on the world stage.

Needless to say, faced with a new political reality that
profoundly troubles them, warpigs are squealing on Wall Street.

Nevertheless, Crimea's reunification with the Russian Federation has happened without a single shot
fired in anger.
This fact alone is astounding and speaks volumes about the
professionalism and efficiency of Russian statecraft. Even prominent
Westerners have begun noting Russia's surprisingly impressive show of force.
Having learned many costly lessons in recent decades, the Russian Bear
is back and seems to be better than ever. As
the world watched, a new reality in Crimea was meticulously and
masterfully crafted. Even mother nature seemed to have accepted Crimea's
historic transformation and reunification with Mother Russia.

Brilliant display of statecraft Recent
weeks have seen an absolutely brilliant display of Russian diplomacy,
military might and realpolitik. In case the point was missed by the
West, there has been a number of large scale military exercises on the
border of Ukraine as well as an ICBM test lunch. We are privileged to be
witnessing this exhibition. Mankind can
also take heart in knowing that there exists today a world power that is
ready, willing and fully capable of standing-up to the
Anglo-American-Zionist alliance and their friends. Russia has proven
once again that it is the last front against American imperialism,
Western Globalism, NATO expansionism, Islamic extremism, Zionism and
pan-Turkism. Russia has given the world community a desperately needed
multi-polarity in international affairs. Moscow has indeed made Ukraine a
very toxic pill for the West to swallow.

In my opinion, these are the historic times President Vladimir Putin was born for.

Crimea is a done deal. Even former US Secretary of Defense RobertGates recognizes
this. The rest of Ukraine is not going anywhere either.
Even if Moscow ultimately decides it won't make a move into eastern Ukraine, Kiev
will not be able to enter the EU nor will be be accepted into NATO - not
with the kind of baggage it now has. At the
end of the day, Ukrainian economic and
energy needs will continue being dependent on
Mother Russia. Moreover, the West will not allocate the
tens-of-billions of dollars needed to keep Ukrainians from starving. In
other words, thanks to EuroMaidan freaks and their Washingtonian pushers, Ukraine is now screwed no
matter how one looks at it, and the West will now have what is
essentially a failed state on their hands. And the biggest and
funniest irony in all this will be to see Western aid money to Kiev
going to Russia to pay for Ukraine's growing energy bills.President Putin will have the last laugh.Perhaps
it was their imperial hubris that blinded them, perhaps desperation. Regardless of why they
did what they did, the West will now have a rude awakening for this is
not 1853, this is not the 1990s nor is it 2004.The Russian Bear has come out of its hibernation and he is hungry and angry.
What do we feed it to help placate it?At the very least, Crimea: Preferably, Crimea, southern Ukraine and regions east of the river Dnieper. And, yes folks, those mysterious soldiers we see in Crimea are from Russia and they do operate under Russian military command. By
sending into Crimea thousands
of highly trained troops and telling Western powers that the
troops in question are not under Russian command - Moscow is essentially
giving the West the middle finger. [As far as it being a lie is
concerned: It's
no bigger lie than American officials crying about respecting
the "territorial integrity" of nations. Western criminals need to be
reminded
of their lies and war crimes against Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, Grenada, El
Salvador, Nicaragua, Venezuela,
Panama, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Serbia, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria,
Egypt and Iran] There is yet another twist to this: Had Moscow
openly sent
troops into Crimea, it would have been considered an invasion, legally speaking.
Since Moscow wants to be at least perceived as upholding international
law - at
the same time not pass up a historic opportunity to liberate Crimea and
rub Western noses in some shit in the process - it is having Russian troops
take off their insignias. With
no Russian military unit positively identified, Western analysts and
journalists have been forced to calling them "pro-Russian forces" and
not "troops from Russia". Moreover,
by not officially having troops on the ground in Crimea, Moscow may be
signaling that it is leaving a door open for negotiations.Simply put, it's genius.If
it all, however, comes down to a shooting war between Ukrainians and
Russians, there is no doubt that the Russian military will crush their
Ukrainian opponents. Russia's armed forces have the weaponry to sink
every opposing
warship within the entire Black Sea basin within the first few days of the war's
outbreak. Russia's armed forces will have the air and ground superiority
throughout eastern Ukraine also within the first few days of the war.
Moreover,
there is also the real possibility that Ukrainian military units will be
severely handicapped by divisions along ethnic and ideological lines
and may even begin fighting each other. At the end of the day, there is
little doubt that
Russia will make short work out of the Ukrainian military and there is
very little doubt that the West will remain on the sidelines.This
is a historic opportunity that the Kremlin cannot pass up. Moscow has
to place its chess pieces correctly. Moscow has to speak in the only
language that Western powers understand. It's retribution time.If
the Kremlin truly wants to make an impressive show of force, exact
revenge and sow
fear in the Western world, as it should, it would be wise for them to
inform Washington, Berlin, Ankara, Paris and London - in very
unambiguous terms - that if any of them
dare enter a possible war between Russia and Ukraine in any capacity,
Moscow will be forced to stop energy deliveries to EU nations and that
the Russian military will establish a
land link with Armenia as a measure to secure its southern flank and
cut-off Azeri oil and gas deliveries to Turkey. In other words,
additional rearranging of borders may be necessary.Moscow does not need to wage a shooting war with the West to hurt them very bad.

I
am not a financial or economics expert, but I'd like to float these ideas:
Let's say the US/EU
pushes Moscow to the point where it feels has no
choice but to cut-off gas shipments to the EU. This will utterly cripple the EU
economy in a matter of days or weeks. Yes, this action will also see a
lose of significant revenue for Moscow. But, faced with such
extraordinary
circumstance, cant
the Central Bank in Russia simply print more money to make up
for the financial lose? Isn't this more-or-less how the US been making a living
in
recent years? Moscow
can also seek to make deals with energy hungry nations such as China, Japan and India to increase
their purchases of Russian energy. What's more, what if Moscow responds by freezing
the assets of Western mega-corporation such as BP
and Exxon-Mobile operating throughout Russia? What if Moscow responds by
demanding anyone that trade with it or purchases energy from it does so in the Russian Ruble?What if Moscow responds by pulling Russian money out of the City of London and Wall Street? What if Moscow responds by cashing in its US Treasury bonds? What if Moscow responds by helping Iran and Venezuela build oil refinery plants?Let's also recall that the West also needs Russia's
cooperation on Syria, Iran, North Korea and Afghanistan.

Russia is not Iraq or Libya

There are a number of things that Moscow can do to cripple the West.
If they have the foresight and the courage to do so, Kremlin officials
can bring the entire Western world to its knees. Russia is perhaps the
most self-sufficient major nation-state on earth today. Unlike
traditional powers like Russia where national institutions and a
professional diplomatic corps
are tasked with formulating and executing state policy, the Western
political establishment operates
essentially under "market principles". If therefore Western actions
against Russia begin hurting the Western economy, or if the West is
faced with losing the US Dollar's status as a global hegemon, the
West will stand down. After all, Russia is not Iraq or Libya.

As
previously mentioned, the Russian Federation is self-sustaining. More
specifically, it does not need the West to survive economically. While
it cooperates with the Western world's "globalized economy", it is not
subject to it's dictates. Militarily, economically and financially,
Russia is to a significant degree immune to Western machinations.
Western powers have little, if any, influence over Moscow. Notice
how even the most bloodthirsty warmongers in Washington are
going out of their way to point out that the military option against
Moscow is off the table. Notice how London and Berlin are in a panic and
strongly
advising against economic and financial sanctions.

While
many pro-Russian observers throughout the years were worried that
Moscow was dealing too closely with Western financial and trade
institutions, I was reminding them that it is always better to keep
your enemies close. As we have now seen, Russian integration into
Western economic/financial structures in recent years has
proven to be one of Moscow's strategic advantages in its fight against the West.Every
single "action" or "measure" Washington threatens
to take against Russia, Moscow will respond symmetrically. While
Western sanctions may or may not have a negative effect on the Russian
economy overall, Russian sanctions against the West has the real
potential to collapse or severely cripple the EU economy.

Moscow should not be too concerned about Western
sanctions.

Other than going nuclear, which is not going to happen, what can the West really do against Russia? What is
the only course of action the West has? A Visa ban for presidents
Yanukovych and Putin?! I'm pretty sure they weren't dying to spend their
holidays in the US.The
point is, in reality, the West is powerless against Russia. If Moscow
is not flaunting all this, it's simply because Russian officials are
still trying very hard to remain clearheaded and responsible on the
global stage.I
am nevertheless glad that Moscow has hit back, and hit back hard. Had
Moscow been passive or tolerant, the fire stoked by the West in Ukraine would have
sooner-or-later spread into Russia.Had
Western actions in Ukraine not been responded to in a forceful way,
similar uprising would have been exported to Belarus, Armenia and
eventually into the Russian heartland itself. Like the highly skilled
grossmeister that he has proven himself to be, President Putin has
turned what seemed like a major political defeat into a major
geostrategic victory. Faced with a serious political setback in Kiev, he has responded with a major victory in Crimea.
With Crimea now reunited with Mother Russia, Moscow will now use its
economic and financial levers to make sure that Ukraine will be beholden
to Mother Russia.Russia's
response has once more shocked the Western world into reality. More
importantly, recent events have awakened nationalism and anti-West
sentiments throughout Russia. Recent events will also most probably
result in closer relations between Moscow and Beijing.We are
privileged in the sense that we are watching history in the
making. The arrogant West has once again made a reckless/haphazard move
by foolishly pushing their EuroMaidan pawns into the fire, now it's
Russia's
turn to make a move on the grand Eurasian chessboard. The Bear has
roared, the
West, as predicted, has cowered. When the dust settles, at the very
least,
recent events will see the liberation - de facto or otherwise - of
Crimea
and certain regions in eastern Ukraine. For this, we can all thank
freaks in Kiev and their masters in the West. Moscow couldn't have done
it without them. Let's hope
that western Ukrainians in particular will now enjoy the fruits of
bending-over to the
West just as much as Greeks have. And let's also hope the illegitimate
regime in Kiev is at least smart enough to use their Western aid to stay
up-to-date with their Gazprom bills.

At the end of the day, the Olympic winter games at Sochi will not be the only astounding Russian success in the region.Operation Barbarossa by other means As
noted in the opening of this commentary and in previous commentaries,
control over Ukraine is key to isolating, containing, undermining and
weakening the Russian Federation west of the Urals. In its historic bid
to defeat Bolshevism, even Nazi Germany recognized the strategic
importance of occupying Ukraine. It should therefore not surprise anyone
that Nazi Germany's successors, the Anglo-American-Zionist order, has
sought to pursue the same strategy against Russia.

It would not be a stretch of the imagination to say that Operation Barbarossa by other means is what we have been witnessing Western powers carry-out in eastern Europe in recent years. In fact, those who partook in the original operation back in 1941 are partaking in the modern version: Western Ukrainians
as well as regional
Turks (Tatars), those at the tip of the Western spear attempting to
pierce Russia today, greeted invading Wehrmacht troops in 1941 with
kisses and flowers.[At the risk of confusing the
reader, I'd like to make a brief point about Ukraine's wannabe-Nazis: I
think those who have a realistic understanding of what the Third Reich
was all about would agree that had Nazi Germany still been around today,
chances are, they would have been on the side of the Russian Federation
and Vladimir Putin.] With that said, it
can be argued whether western Ukraine's Russophobia at the time was justified or
not, but the reality of the matter is that their hatred of Russians is
still around and it is this ethnic hatred that is being meticulously
exploited by Anglo-American-Jewish interests for the past twenty years.In the big picture, the crisis in Ukraine can be accurately characterized as a Western
drive - via EU and NATO - into territories that have traditionally been under Russian
control. It's all part of a systematic campaign to
weaken Russian power and influence west of the Urals by creating a
string of allied buffer states. With Baltic nations and former
Warsaw-Pact nations mostly absorbed into NATO and EU and with Georgia and
Azerbaijan ready and willing to follow suit - this geostrategic campaign to
encircle, contain and weaken the Russian Federation will not be complete until Belarus and
Armenia are also severed away
from Moscow as well. There is also the constant fear that Western
intelligence may once more attempt to inflame Muslims in the north
Caucasus or even try to stoke the flames of pan-Turkism amongst Tatars
in the very heart of Russia.Russia had no choice but to respond very forcefully inn Ukraine.

The need for defensive depth

We need to put aside the silly notion that Russia is somehow trying to recreate the "Soviet Union". This type of fearmongering against Russia is the by-product of professional Russophobes such as
Zbigniew Brzezinski, warmongering psychopaths like John McCain and opportunistic reptiles like Hillary Clinton.

What Moscow has been doing in its "near abroad"
(i.e. former Soviet territory) is much less ambitious than what they want us to believe. In fact, what Moscow is doing is
what all nation-states do to preserve themselves.For military planers in charge of securing national borders, securing something that is know as defensive depth and buffer zones
are an essential part of a comprehensive national defense formula. This
is especially the case with major nation-states who have historically
had serious problems with neighbors.Western
European powers have the Atlantic Ocean and allied
buffer states in eastern Europe for
their defensive depth. The United States has two
natural barriers: Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and two allied buffer
states, Canada and Mexico for its security. On the other hand, the
Russia Federation, a vast tract of land that stretches from Europe to
the Far East, does not have the luxury of its peers in the Western
world. Be it in central Europe, the Baltics, Scandinavia,
the Arctic region, the Black Sea region, the Caucasus (north and
south), central Asia, Chinese border or Alaska, Russian officials are constantly
on the watch. It's not an enviable responsibility, but it is admirable
how successful Russian leaders have been for the most part during the
past several hundred years.Russia's geography has for ages dictated Russian political policy and
has given Russians themselves their unique characteristics.Ruling
over a multi-ethnic land that is vast in size and wealth, and links
Europe, Middle East, Central Asia and the Far East is simply put a
gargantuan task. Russian officials have no choice but to remain vigilant
and not shy away from resorting to
violence to ensure the security of Russia's borders. This is why
Russians historically crave strongmen. This is why President Vladimir
Putin has been so popular in Russia.

When it comes to being militarily aggressive and geostrategically proactive: Russia has no choice, if it is to preserve itself.During the early post-Soviet years Moscow reluctantly
tolerated Western inroads into former communist regions of
eastern-Europe because it was in no shape to react in any meaningful ways. With
that said, Western policymakers knew very well that Ukraine, Belarus
and greater Caucasus region would be Moscow's red lines for these were
strategic buffer regions that Russia could not afford to give up to
NATO.Let's recall that when Moscow's red line in the south Caucasus was crossed
by NATO and Georgian officials back in 2008, the Russian Bear reacted
ferociously. Therefore, I do not understand why people are so surprised that
the Russian Bear has reacted similarly in a nation that is even more important to Russians.When
Ukraine, a strategic buffer nation that also happened to be a brotherly
Slavic nation - and a region where the Russian nation itself had its birth one thousand years ago - was
infiltrated by Western interest, Russia had no choice but to react.It has to be emphasized that if Moscow stops in Crimea, the
West will have won because eastern Ukraine pushes deep into European
Russia. This will also place Belarus and Armenia at heightened risk. Moscow
therefore needs to escalate albeit systematically and in a well
calculated manner. Moscow needs to do everything it can to put Russian
speaking regions east of the river Dniepre under Russian control,
direct or otherwise. Moscow needs to do everything it can economically
and financially to put pressure on the illegitimate regime now in power in Kiev to
make them realize that they need Russia more than the EU.With
that said, now that Western powers have gotten western Ukrainians to
destroy their nation, let's see now helpful the West will be towards
them. Let's also
see how democratic and not-corrupt the new regime will be. I have a
strong feeling that so-called EuroMaidan
activists will sooner-than-later come to the sober realization that
they desperately need Mother Russia for survival. But it will be too
late.Incompetent or evil, or both?Now, that the West's agenda has reach the very doorstep of Russia, many
political observers are wondering what is the West's end game in
Europe. In the traditional sense, Western provocations against Russia
seem quite ill conceived and wrought with many dangers not only for
central Europe but also for the West itself.Why therefore go down this path?

There
is an explanation, albeit not a pleasant one: Getting two brotherly
nations to start killing each other may be a part of the overall Western
agenda in Ukraine. If there is a shooting war between western
Ukrainians and pro-Russian forces in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, Western
powers will have sown fear in
Europe, given new life to NATO, militarized pacifistic European powers
and rallied them all behind the American flag for decades to come.
This way they will have a better pretext to move Western military
installation
further east onto the doorstep of Russia and of course increase
military
spending in Washington at a time when policymakers in the US are
thinking of historic cuts.
Moreover, the agenda may also be seeking to derail the Moscow-led
Eurasian Union and weaken Russia's expanding economy by breaking
Moscow's oil/gas strangle hold over Europe.That in doing so Anglo-American-Jews are risking a new prolonged cold war, a serious blow-back or a third world war is
altogether another topic and reveals yet again the character of people we are
dealing with.

Which begs the question: Are these people this incompetent or just evil? Perhaps both?

The
answer may actually lie in the recognition that they are worried,
desperate, blinded by arrogance and led by a false sense of superiority,
megalomania and gluttony.Allow me to explain:Western
powers are bloated with several centuries of plundered wealth and
nearly a century of near total dominance over global affairs. Western
powers have come to
control global trade routs and the commodities exchange. They set the
world's political, financial and cultural trends. The US Dollar is the
world's reserve currency. Western power and influence is unprecedented - but it has been wanning in
recent years. With dwindling natural resources under their direct
possession and the emergence of competitive powers around the world,
their near total control
of the political and financial life of the world is slowly being
challenged.

I
think the fundamental danger lies in the fact that Western powers are
doing their best to secure their hegemony in a new century when emerging
powers are poised to become their global competitor. In other words,
the Western elite is deeply worried about maintaining its opulent lifestyle. The
tens-of-millions of Westerners that live in mansions, gated communities
and on vast estates - and the elite that preside over them - want to maintain their standard of living and
not surrender it to Asiatic, backward upstarts in Russia or China.The worrying part here for me is that they will go
to great lengths - including bringing the world to the very brink of
catastrophe - simply to ensure their global supremacy and money flow.Another
worrying things is that Western powers feel immune, and in the
particular case of Washingtonians, they feel destined to rule the world
as evidenced by a peculiar psychosis infamously known as "American
Exceptionalism".The Western world's world view has been cultivated by centuries of easy money and a safe geography.Western nations such as the US and Britain have historically provoked wars
around the world knowing well that due to their safe distances from the
killing fields, their respective nations could weather such crisis and then simply come in
at the end to exploit the spoils in the aftermath. Thus, from a
distance
they destroy, they destabilize... they then come in to gather the spoils of war, rebuild and lead. Of course
there is also the added benefit of selling weapons to warring factions
and purchasing assets and/or commodities in troubled nations at rock
bottom prices.Another benefit to sowing unrest around the world is
enjoying the acquisition of hard currency. The more nations they
destabilize, the more money pours into their coffers by wealthy
individuals and firms taking their money out of those troubled nations and
placing it into the perceived security of Western banks. Immense amounts of wealth
have in fact been poured into London and New York in recent years from all over the world in
this very manner. Where did many of Russia's Jewish oligarchs flee to with their plundered wealth after Putin chased them out? The so-called "City of London"!This
imperial arrogance, megalomania, opulence and gluttony coupled with
money worries and the strong sense that nothing will happen to them
regardless of what they do overseas, lies at the root of their political
thinking and world view. It also lies at the root of their
blood-thirst.As
long as the
Anglo-American-Jewish world is not made to suffer serious consequences
for actions overseas, they will continue their volatile sociopolitical
experiments and militaristic aggression around the world regardless of
the amount of misery and carnage they cause.

At
the end of the day, when it comes to international relations, Russians
are playing chess while Western cowboys are playing poker.Sooner or later the gambler's luck will run out.The
Western gamble in Ukraine will backfire, as all gambles against Russia
have. Russians will rally behind their flag as they tend to do in such
times. With Crimea back under its rule, Moscow will pursue securing its
near-abroad more aggressively than ever before. Russian nationalists and
hardliners in Moscow will gain the upper hand in Russian politics.
Pro-Western/liberal Russians will become more marginalized. Russian
money will become more concentrated within Russia. And, no, liquified
natural gas (LNG) is not the West's magic answer for it will cost too
much to produce and transport to the EU, not to mention the fact that it
will come at a terrible ecological price. At the end of the day, Europe will remain largely reliant on Russian energy for the foreseeable future.
Moreover, this all has the potential of bringing Moscow and Beijing
closer. Russia will therefore not be "isolated" nor will be be brought
to their knees. Those standing to lose terribly from all this is the US,
Europe, Turkey and Ukraine.What's with all the Washingtonian blunders?

Senior
career diplomats in the US have been criticizing the way Washington has
been pursuing political agendas overseas. Senior retired US officials
have been criticizing Washington's actions overseas. Senior retired US
military officers have been criticizing the way Washington has been
handling military matters overseas. With so many seasoned experts
sounding the alarm about Washington's foolish actions, what's with all
the blunders?

I
have a strong feeling I know why Washington continues
to make what seems like serious geopolitical mistakes on the world
stage.

Once more we may be seeing the hand of Democracy (pandering to
special groups) and Capitalism (monetary profit being the main political
goal) at play. Having willingly shed itself of its traditional identity
and true nationalism as a result of multiculturalism and
ultra-Liberalism, Washington's world view today has come to be tainted
merely by financial pursuits around the world.For American officials, the world is a open market and the US is its headquarters.

The delusionary approach
to international relations is vividly seen in how American news
commentators, pundits and politicians alike have been assessing
President Putin's actions in Crimea. The
most popular "analysis" I keep hearing lately is that Putin will back
down
once his oligarchs start losing money and they begin putting pressure on him.

Russia's oligarchs will rein in Putin?

Are these people fucking serious? This is absolute hogwash!

Having
preserved Russian nationalism despite the corrosive effects of
Globalism during the past two decades, the Kremlin is able to formulate a
foreign policy that is based on nationalistic considerations and not
financial pursuits. This is because from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean, Moscow has borders to protect.
And nutjobs posing as "experts" in the West think Kremlin officials are going to
change their minds simply because of money concerns? How idiotic. It's very
scary how out-of-touch these people are from reality and it's even scarier
that these people actually represent a global empire who's power is
unprecedented in human history.

Nevertheless,
Ukraine was not the first geostrategic miscalculation by the West.
There have been similar miscalculations in recent years and they may all be a direct result of
allowing non-governmental groups and moneymen to have a say in policy
formulation. Political observers have noted for many years that Washington, as a political institution, has been hijacked by the thing
known as "special interests". Powerful non-governmental groups have used immense sums
of money and influence to basically buy elections and officials. This is more-or-less where the American axiom "the best government money can buy" comes from.A
similar situation is seen within the financial system of the US where
the gargantuan task of regulating the American empire's finances is
trusted to the privately owned Federal Reserve. Therefore,
when it comes to politics and economics, US policy is merely a reflection
of the wishes of its private sector financial/political elite.

Is this a prudent approach in governing a global empire? Of course not.
It is in fact this factor in
Washingtonian politics that is taking the US down the
path of self-destruction, for American policies around the world, as well as those in the US, no longer
reflect sound logic nor do they actually reflect American interests.

Due
to arrogance, ignorance and a world view tainted by a stock-market
mentality, Americans are once more terribly misreading events and the US
will suffer long-term consequences as a result.

In
my opinion, the special interest factor in Western politics is the main
difference between the foreign policies formulated by Western powers
and foreign policies formulated by traditional national
institutions as in Russia.In
traditional nation-states, national
institutions, high ranking military officials, state-funded think tanks
and a state control central bank formulate policies, both foreign and
domestic. In such a traditional approach, risks of making
serious mistakes is significantly reduced. We see Moscow following a
traditional model. Moscow is executing politics as devised by its
veteran
political analysts, military officials, career politicians and
economists -
while Washington has no choice but to follow the wishes of its special
interests groups. This is yet another sign of American decline.

Observers
will sooner-or-later
understand that unlike in the West, where money is the only god and
money determines much of Western policy formulations, for traditional
powers such as Russia, national interests will always trump financial
considerations.

Nonetheless, all this silly talk about expelling Russia from the G-8, placing
sanctions on Russia,
barring Russian officials from traveling to the "civilized world" and
freezing Russian assets underscores the very urgent need to wrestle
away international finance and trade from Anglo-American-Jewish
control.

Moscow needs to give the West the middle finger and simply do what it
needs to do to protect its western frontier from further Western
incursion.

Phony pretext? 19th century? Really, Kerry?

American officials
are all of a sudden concerned about "false pretexts", "international law", "human rights" and "national
sovereignty"?!?!?! Russia is behaving as if it's the 19th century?!?!?! There
is bullshit and then there is bullshit but this kind of bullshit, coming after
years of Western war
crimes around the world is a fucking joke!

But nobody is
laughing.

During the past twenty three years Washington did its best to
set exactly this kind of a precedence in international affairs. Remember Kosovo? Washington did its best to convince the world that might makes right. Remember Iraq? Washington did its best to show complete and utter disregard for international law and human suffering. Remember Afghanistan?Remember Libya? Remember Syria? Now, Washingtonian reptiles need to understand that they will reap what they have sown.With that said, how does horse face John Kohen
Kerry utter the following nonsense without snickering? I am surprised he did not
get an Oscar for his impeccable acting. You gotta love "American Exceptionalism" at its ugliest -

Phony pretext? 19 century? Really, Kerry? If I may ask: What century was Iraq invaded, and by who's false pretext? By the way, what happened to Democracy in Iraq?

War criminals in Washington have no right in rebuking Russia about anything. What's
phony about Moscow wanting to protect a historically Russian region with
a Russian population from anti-Russian thugs that with Western help
overthrew the pro-Russian president and took over the country? What's
phony about Crimea being one of the most important strategic military
points for the Russian Federation?Speaking
of phony pretexts that have led to military and/or economic aggression
against nations: Yes, there have been quite a few in recent decades, but
they have not involved the Russian Federation. Let's look at them one
more time: Cuba,
Vietnam, Nicaragua, Panama, Granada, Venezuela, Lebanon, Palestine,
Iraq, Serbia, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Egypt and Iran.
These nations have been molested by Washington and friends in one form
or another for decades. Some 21 century Western targets, like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya
and Syria, have suffered utter destruction and hundreds-of-thousands of deaths.Regarding
that silly thing called "international law": Once Western-backed
insurgents in western Ukraine resorted to violence to overthrow
the legitimately elected president of Ukraine, all legal considerations were
thrown out the window and the Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine was fair game for Russian intervention. With an illegitimate government now in power in Kiev,
Moscow reserves the right to protect Russian-Ukrainians and
in doing so right the wrongs of history by liberating Crimea and eastern Ukraine.Other than blowing a lot of hot air, and public displays of childish temper-tantrums, the West is capable of doing nothing.In a very feeble attempt to discredit Russian President Vladimir Putin, Hillary Clinton and a host of other politicians and political "experts" in the US have recently begun stating that the
political pretext President
Putin used to militarily secure Crimea was historically
similar to what German Chancellor Adolph Hitler did in the Sudetenland
back in 1938.Well, folks, no need to go that far back in history. There is a much better comparison, and it's much closer to Washington.
I'd
like to remind the Whore of Babylon and her interlocutors throughout
the US that little over thirty years ago the US military invaded the
tiny island nation of Grenada
because American officials at the time were claiming that the
leadership of that strategic island in the Caribbean Sea had been taken over by Communist Cubans in a coup-detat.
If that wasn't geopolitically similar enough to the recent crisis in the Ukraine, then hear this: The
US excuse at the time, the political pretext used to militarily invade the tiny, defenseless nation
was the "protection" of a few hundred American medical students stuck on the island. I was a
teenager back then, but I followed the events very closely. I remember
cheering when it was finally reported that American Rangers and Marines had
liberated the students, defeated the Cubans and taken over the island. I was ecstatic
that under President Ronald Reagan's leadership we in the US were finally able
to put the "Vietnam syndrome" behind us.If
I can remember Grenada, I am pretty sure so can Clinton, so can Kerry,
so can McCain, so can Obama and so can every single news executive in
the US. I find it therefore very hypocritical and even underhanded that
this bit of American history is totally absent from the airwaves in the
West. With that said,
what Russia is doing in Crimea today is incomparably more legitimate
than what Washington did in Grenada back in 1983.

Russia's fight is Armenia's fight

Bringing Crimea back to Mother Russia has been a wonderful event for all
self-respecting Russians worldwide. I would like to add that by correcting the mistakes of Communism,
Moscow has also set a wonderful precedence for Armenians of Artsakh. Armenia has taken the right step by becoming the first political entity after the Russian Federation to officially recognize Crimea's right to self-determination. Needless to say, Washingtonian reptiles are upset. It
is my opinion that as long as Yerevan preserves its strategic ties with
Moscow and works to cultivate better Russo-Armenian relations, we
Armenians will sooner-or-later also see a similar reunification of
Artsakh with Armenia - with full Russian backing.

But, first
thing's first: Before we expect Russians to assist us in such a manner,
we as a people need to rid ourselves of our Asiatic ways, Russophobia,
political ignorance and Western agents. In other words, as long as Armenia flirts with
the political West and continues to host an army of Western operative
and organizations, Moscow will keep Armenia vulnerable, dependent and on
a very short leash.

Is this some kind of a terrible dream?
Is this perhaps a Paruyr Hayrikian fantasy?

No folks, this is reality and
it's an inevitable by-product
of an absurdity in Yerevan known as "complimentary politics". A recent
NATO military exercise indeed saw Armenian troops side-by-side with
Turkish, Azeri, Ukrainian and American troops practicing war games
against none other than Russia -

Apparently, Armenian officials did not have the self-respect
to say no to NATO and instead send Armenian troops to Syria to help
beleaguered Armenians there organize their self-defense - against NATO supported Al Qaeda terrorists nonetheless. Apparently, Armenian officials did not have the decency or the courage to inform Western officials that
Armenia will not participate in this particular exercise essentially because it is
being carried out against Yerevan's strategic partner - with
two nations that are openly hostile to Armenia nonetheless. Armenian officials did not have the balls to tell Western officials that
Armenia will not participate in this particular program essentially because it is
being carried out against a people's right to self-determination.

Just think: Joining Turks, Azeris, Ukrainians, Georgians and
Americans in military maneuvers designed to be a show of force against
Russia - Armenia's only lifeline, Armenia's only strategic partner and
Armenia's only hope for Artsakh? Just think: Participating in a military show of force essentially against a people's right to self-determination? Just think: Armenians war-gaming with a bunch or people who are currently in the process of destroying the Armenian community of Syria?

Are Armenian officials out of their fucking minds? Are Armenians really this self-destructive when it comes to politics?

How much lower are our money hungry whores willing to go for Western bribes?
How long
will our chobans flirt with political disaster and national suicide? How long will
Armenia have to endure being stuck in the middle with no place to go?
How long will Armenians continue insulting and antagonizing Armenia's only ally in the world?

Although I am all for evolution and not revolution, being that Western assets have set deep roots throughout Armenia, I'm afraid we may need a Moscow sponsored revolution in Yerevan to rid ourselves of
our Captain Americas as well as our chobans-in-Armani-suits posing as government officials. We need Moscow to help us start with a clean slate.

Today,
Armenia's "complimentary politics" is
a serious liability for Armenia. This is no longer the 1990s. The West
is in a decline. For the foreseeable future, we will have to live with a
resurgent Bear. The good news for us here is that Russian and Armenian
interests align for the most part. Moscow needs Armenia as a southern
fortress protecting
Russia's vulnerable underbelly from Western inroads, pan-Turkism and
Islam. Armenia needs Russia to protect it from all her neighbors. Our
enemies and their enemies are essentially the same. What we have between
Russia and Armenia is a true strategic alliance. From an Armenian
perspective, Armenia
today has a strategic partner that is a global superpower, and one that
is the alpha and the omega of Caucasian politics. Armenians need to
exploit
this historic opportunity for Armenia's long term benefit. If we want
Armenia to prosper one day, we need to stop our pursuit of Western
fantasies (democracy, liberalism, free speech, civil society, gay
rights, feminism, globalism,
etc) and begin to better understand the nuances of geopolitics and
Armenia's place in it.

For once let's stop admiring Jews and let's start
acting like them. Instead of fear-mongering about the growth of Russian
power, let's realize that Armenians can be in Russia what Jews are in
America.

And if we cant do any of the above and we continue our
traditional self-destructive path in politics, I much rather see Armenia
get incorporated into the Russian Federation. At the end of the day,
it's better to live with Russians (similar to Ossetians or Abkhazians)
than live like a bunch of endangered gypsies under Turco-Western rule.
At the end of the day, Armenian independence from Russia means Armenian dependence on Turkey.
No Russia in the south Caucasus means no Armenia in the south Caucasus.
It's all that simple. We all need to wake up from our Qaj Nazar
fantasies and EUrotic dreams and realize that there are no alternatives
to this reality.

Due
to the recent Ukraine crisis, Western news media has been rife with
news stories about the plight of Crimean Tatars both past and present. For
all intents and purposes, Tatars, Azeris and Turks are half-brothers
and they make up the very foundation of pan-Turkism in Eurasia. Tension between Russians and Tatar-Turks would serve Armenian interests.In
fact, such a thing would also serve Russian interests for Turkic-Muslims are like
cancerous tumors within the Russian mainland. Kremlin officials would do well to conclude that as long as Russia hosts
large numbers of these types of people, Russians will never truly be secure in
their homelands.Therefore, I really hope the Western world takes it upon itself now to champion
the Tatar question.Hypothetically speaking, if the absolute worst case scenario
happens - i.e. NATO gets involved and Russia is somehow defeated in Ukraine -
there will most probably be a full-scale Azeri attack against Armenia
and/or Artsakh. Even without the worst the case scenario, any scenario that
sees Russia backing off for any reason and allowing Ukraine to fall
fully into Western hands will have a very adverse geostrategic impact on
Russia, Belarus and Armenia. Any weakening of Russia will see an
immediate strengthening of Western, Turkic and Islamic interests
throughout the region. If
Russia fails in the Ukraine and Western powers succeed in pushing right
onto Russia's south-western borders, Armenians can expect Turks,
Azeris, Tatars, Caucasian Muslims and Wahhabi Islamists to eventually
come knocking at Armenia's door. And when that day comes, all our Western activists in Armenia will be on the first flight out.

Turks,
Wahhabi Islamists and Western powers have been in a tight embrace due
to serious geostrategic factors. This situation will not change as long
as Russians, Iranians and pan-Arab nationalism are political factors
within the region. Therefore, one must be deaf, dumb and blind to assume
that Western powers are genuinely concerned about Democracy and human
rights in Armenia, or that they will help defend Armenia against Turks.

Need I remind the reader of the twenty year old economic blockade of a landlocked and poor Armenia by NATO member Turkey? Need I reminded the reader of the threats NATO member Turkey has made against Armenia during the past twenty years? Need I remind the reader that it was a NATO
member state that shamelessly released an Azeri barbarian accused of
using an axe to murder a sleeping Armenian soldier? Need I remind the
reader that it is NATO that supported Islamic Bosnians and Albanians against Christian Serbs? Need I remind the reader that is was NATO
that recently tried to invade Syria to help Islamic terrorists to come
to power in Damascus? Need I remind the reader of the billions being
invested into Azerbaijan by Western powers? Need I remind the reader of the arms and training Western powers and Israel are providing to Azerbaijan? Need I remind the reader that the Anglo-American-Zionist alliance is plotting Iran's destruction? Need I remind the reader that Washington
has a large arsenal of nuclear bombs stationed in Turkey? Need I remind
the reader that the only thing our annual ass kissing in Washington will do for us is give us all a brown nose?A better look at Western-Turkish relations as compared to Russian-Armenian relations -

A Russian defeat in eastern Europe or in the Caucasus will prove catastrophic not only for Russia but also for Armenia.
Any form of Russian victory on the other hand
will bring the entire region that much closer to Pax Russicana. It has
been the Pax Russicana of the past two hundred years that has allowed
Armenians to flourish in the region previously inhabited by an
assortment of Turkic and Islamic tribes.

Now,
in Ukraine, we are once again seeing just how Western and Turkish
interests are closely aligned in the region. During the winter Olympic
games in Sochi, the Western press took every opportunity to spread
awareness of the so-called Circassian genocide,
the same press mind you that does its utmost to ignore or call into
question the historic validity of the Armenian Genocide. Now, the same
press is raising the alarm out the plight of Turkic-Tatars. No surprise
there. Our sheeple
need to take their heads out of their asses and come to the recognition
that their beloved "democratic" leaders in the West are strategically
allied to Turkic peoples and Wahhabi Muslims and this geostrategic
calculus will not change for the foreseeable future.For
the Russian Federation, Armenia is a crucially important geostrategic
asset in the south Caucasus. For the West, Armenia, with all its
problems with Turks and Azeris, is a nuisance. In other words, despite
the best efforts of our idiots to bring "Democracy" into Armenia,
Western powers will continue seeing Armenia as a geopolitical obstacle.Being
that the south Caucasus is one major event away from turning back into
being a Turkic-Islamic cesspool, our nationalistic chobans need to put
aside their Qaj Nazar mentalities and realize that Armenia is in no
shape to even dream about fighting its enemies alone. In other words, no
Russia in the south Caucasus means no Armenia in the south Caucasus. Therefore, no matter how one looks at it, Russia's fight in Ukraine is Armenia's fight.If
our Western-backed, self-destructive peasantry of the political
opposition in Armenia somehow managed to topple the regime in Yerevan
and country was forced to sever its ties to Moscow, I would be the first
one beseeching
the Russian President to send Russian troops into Armenia (with or
without
insignias) and I would be the fist one out, with a Russian flag in my
hand,
cheering their arrival. As I said: If our people continue to show
incompetence and
suicidal tendencies in politics, I
would much rather Armenia enter the Russian Federation and be done with
it.

For Armenia's sake Russia has to be successful. For
Russia to be successful,
Moscow has to take some form of permanent control over Crimea. Moscow
has to make sure regions east of the Dnipere are culturally, financially
and economically tied to it. The Western-backed regime in Kiev has to
be brought to its knees through economic warfare. This is a very serious
situation not only for Russia but also for Armenia. If Russia is not
able to stop Western inroads into the south-western border regions of
Russia, the Western
campaign will soon spread to the south Caucasus. If that happens,
Armenia will eventually be faced with a bloody uprising.

Is an Armenian “Maidan” possible?Why does Washington engineer revolutions around the world?Because it can.Why can
it?Because we the sheeple allow them.Washington has in recent years become the leaderof self-destructive peasantry worldwide. While
our silly and hopelessly naive compatriots, both in the
Diaspora and Armenia, were gleefully busying themselves with utter
nonsense such as begging Washingtonian reptiles to say the "G" word,
democracy, fair elections, transparency, freedom of speech, gay rights,
civil
society, oligarchs and corruption, their financial and spiritual leaders
in Washington were gradually turning the entire region where Armenia
is
located into a volatile powder keg. In other words, as Western officials
were pursuing an imperial agenda in the south Caucasus, they were
having Armenians chase their tails with Western fairytales.Once more: Armenia's
primary problem is the geopolitical climate in the south Caucasus.
Armenia's primary problem is the Great Games being played in the region
between Russia and the Western world. Armenia's other serious problem is
its now counterproductive approach to international relations known as
complimentary politics. With that said, Yerevan needs to stop giving
Western agents such as Civilitas, Nakhakhorhrdaran, Raffi Hovannisian
and Paruyr Hayrikian a political platform to spew their toxic venom.
Yerevan has to stop providing Western trained officials such as the IMF
trained Tigran Sargsyan positions within the government. Yerevan has to
stop allowing subversive Western institutions such as USAID and the IMF
any footprint inside Armenia. Yerevan also needs to curb the operations
of some of its Western funded NGOs and news organizations.As
long as this unstable and potential volatile situation continues, that
is as long as Yerevan continues to flirt with Western powers (often
times for personal gain) and Pax Russicana is not realized in the south
Caucasus, Armenia will continue suffering severe sociopolitical and
socioeconomic malaise - even if Armenia's so called oligarchs turned
into angles overnight.In
the meanwhile, Washington will use all its levers both in-and-out of
the Armenian republic to rally the disgruntled peasantry and societal
freaks against their state. Washington will exploit every single
contentious issue within Armenia to foment unrest.Although
I can't say I am surprised, it's
been disturbing nonetheless to watch Armenian flags and Armenian
activists side-by-side with
Turkish, Tatar and Azeri flags and activists in Kiev's Maidan. It's
even more disturbing that even after seeing Ukraine descend into chaos
and bloodshed as a result of Western provocations, certain sectors
within Armenia's political opposition are somehow feeling emboldened. In
my opinion, regardless of their lofty rhetoric and stated intentions,
Armenia's Western-funded/Western-inspired opposition freaks are fast
becoming dangerous fifth columns in
the country.Will there be a Ukraine type uprising in Armenia? The short answer is, no.

With that said, I hope clowns in the tacky circus
called the "political opposition" in Armenia are closely watching
events as they unravel in Ukraine. I hope they are closely watching the
country plunge into economic collapse, chaos, bloodshed and division as a
result of their political illiteracy, Russophobia and
pursuit of Western fairytales.One way or
another, "EuroMaidan" activists will sooner-or-later go crawling back
to Mother Russia. Nonetheless, and regardless of what happens in Kiev now, Crimea has been
liberated. The Kremlin has
indeed made Ukraine a very hard pill for the West to swallow, and it's
not over yet. Are we ready to allow our West-leaning "political
opposition" to create a similar situation in Armenia?

AlthoughUkraine and Armenia are not very much alike as nations, their sociopolitical situations, however, do have a lot of similarities. EuroMaidan
activists, those who have brought their nation to the brink of calamity
due to their political illiteracy and hate, are the equivalent of
Armenia's political opposition. The Armenian and Ukrainian political oppositions are vivid examples of just how ignorant the masses are and why they can never be trusted in
political matters. At the end of the day,
the crisis in the
Ukraine may yet prove to be a very good lesson for
our opposition idiots. Main lessons
being:

The recognition of the paramount importance of Pax Russicana on the
southern periphery of Eurasia, stretching from eastern Europe
to central Asia

The
recognition of the paramount importance of Russian hegemony in the
Caucasus and having Russian boots on the ground in Armenia

The recognition of the paramount importance of Slavic-Orthodox Christian nationalism in Russia

The recognition that Turks and Muslims have an instinctual fear of Russians

The realization that Western
aid, Western-leaning politicians and political activists, Western-funded
NGOs, think tanks, rights advocates and news outlets pose a serious
threat to Armenia

The realization that Western powers do not really
care about democracy, peace, stability, human rights or prosperity in
non-Western nations

The
realization that even an attempted political shiftaway from Russia will at the very least result in Armenia losing Artsakh

The realization that Western and Turkish interests throughout the region compliment each other due to their shared interest to weaken Russian power and influence

The
realization that the Armenian opposition's political designs for
Armenia and Turkish/Azeri desires for Armenia share many similarities

The
realization that Armenia's political opposition activists, whether they
realize it or not, are serving Western imperial interests

The realization
that Armenia does not need
a political system that is as toxic and as unstable as democracy

The realization that
Armenia's so-called oligarchs are the least of the problems facing
Armenia today

The realization that the entire Caucasus region is utterly saturated by Turks,
Azeris, Tatars, Caucasian Muslims, Western imperial designs and
international energy interests

The realization that Armenia needs sociopolitical evolution not a Western sponsored revolution

The
realization that foreign inspired revolutions don't lead to anything
good and only results the replacement of one corrupt government with
another

The
realization that those waiting on the sidelines in Yerevan to take
advantage of any political unrest in Armenia are Armenia's
enemies

The
recognition that without Russian energy supplies, trade, investments
and military aid, Armenia will collapse as a nation-state

It
is said that revolutions are dreamed of by romantics, carried-out by
adventurists and exploited by scoundrels. We saw this more-or-less play
out in Kiev recently. Washington promised the sheeple of western Ukraine their "moment", but what they ended up getting is screwed - as so many who believed in Western promises have in the past.

After seeing all we have been seeing, will
our
political opposition freaks in and out of the homeland still be seeking
closer relations with the West? Will they still be seeking EU membership? Will they still be seeking to shift
Armenia away from Russia? Will they still be collaboratingwith Western powers? Will
they still be seeking to topple President Serj Sargsyan at all costs? Will Washington-backed opportunist like Raffi
Hovanissian still be demanding that Moscow pay rent for its use of the 102nd military base in Gyumri? Will Armenia's longest serving Western agent Paruyr Hayrikian still be demanding that Russia pull its troops out of Armenia? In other words, will Uncle Sam's street whores in Armenia still act as stupid and as suicidal as before? I'm afraid they will -

The
good news is that despite Uncle Sam's best efforts, a Ukraine-type
uprising will not succeed in Armenia.
Let's recall that even when the political opposition had a lot of
momentum back in 2008, when Levon Petrosian's gang incited thousands to riot, they proved unable to unseat the government. After
several of
the rioters were shot dead by interior ministry troops, all the rest
fled back to their homes. At the end of the day, Armenians are not as violent, aggressive, disciplined, organized or political
as
Europeans. Moreover, unlike western Ukrainians, Armenians generally speaking
are not Russophobic and Armenia is not a multi-ethnic society with any discernible divisions to be exploited.

As repugnant as the political opposition is in Armenia, they
are no way near as dangerous as the one in Ukraine. If, however, freaks in the political opposition do the unthinkable and take to the streets, they deserve absolutely no mercy anymore. I know there is a joint Armenian-Russian contingency plan to deal with such an attempt.There will not be a
repeat of events in Kiev in Yerevan. I have many concerns
about Armenia, but a Ukraine-type uprising is not one of them at this
time. But I do have to confess however that a part of me does want to
see such an attempt by the political opposition. With the gloves now off in Moscow, it
would be a very good opportunity to finally rid Armenia of Washington's street whores. We are living in historic timesAs
far as its Western antagonists are concerned, Russia is too large, too
independent, too powerful and simply possesses too much natural wealth.
For Western political masterminds, Russia is either a source of easily exploited wealth
or a potential competitor on the global stage. Therefore, Russia has to
be either subjugated and exploited (similar to what occurred throughout
much of the 1990s) or contained, isolated or, if possible, fragmented.

This
is essentially how the Western world has been viewing the Russian
nation for the
past two hundred years. The importation of Marxism into the Russian
Empire a century ago was in fact a by-product of this kind of political
culture that has been so prevalent throughout the Western world.
Bolshevism was the
sociopolitical and ideological tool that foreign interests as far away
as in
Wall Street, New York used to drive a wedge between the ruler and the
ruled in
Russia. The intent geostrategic was to destroy the Czarist empire.It's not much different today.History repeats itself. More things change the more they stay the same. While the names and titles have changed, the essence remains the same. Western
powers have figured out
once more that when it comes to dealing with an uncooperative
government, it's
much better to by-pass its officials and go straight to the gullible
masses. The following will help the reader better understand how Western
powers manipulate targeted societies across the world -

The name of the game is who can best
manipulate the sheeple. Western power in this regard is unprecedented. They have the powerful tools - psychological, financial and organizational
- to manipulate and exploit. They have mainstream news
media to disseminated propaganda under the guise of independent
journalism. They have a whole range of well funded NGOs championing all
kinds of causes. They have the financial means to bribe officials and
enslave nations through trade and/or loans. They have a great multitude
of brainwashed activists to organize opposition groups and take to the
streets. They have the provocateurs to incite unrest when needed. They
have the professional agents who work covertly behind the scenes. More
importantly, they have the cultural tools like Hollywood and MTV to
mesmerize, stupefy and create an alternative reality for the global
sheeple. Similar to what Bolshevism was one hundred years ago, so-called
"Democracy" movements we are seeing spring-up around the world today
appeal to the basic/primitive instincts of mankind. Let it surprise no
one therefore that advocates of such movements in developing or
underdeveloped nations tend to be those on the fringes of normal
society. Similar to what Bolshevism represented one hundred years ago, Western instigated Democracy movements today
appeal to the disgruntled masses of the world with false promises of a
better life. They say: "Look at how developed our lands are". But they
fail to say that "Democracy" was not how the Western world got so
wealthy. They
say: "Look at how free our citizens are". But they don't tell us that
the freedom in Western lands is mostly illusionary, a perception they
have crafted through mass psy-ops. They also don't tell us that the
Western political system is based on institutionalized corruption. They
similarly do not tell us that the Western world is administered not by
the people but by an elite. Similar to what Bolshevism
was, Democracy movements today are weaponized and exported to targeted
nation (i.e. nations that are not subjugated by Western financial
institutions or under Western boots).

On
the eve of the one hundredth anniversary of the First World War,
Russian lands are once again being attacked by corrosive ideological
movements formulated and promoted in Western lands. In the larger
picture, this is not only Russia's fight - this is humanity's fight.
This is indeed a fight between good against evil. In closing, I would
like to say that I hope my next blog commentary will not have to be
about a new European war. I pray for peace - but I hope Kremlin
officials are getting their big guns ready just in case. We simply cannot afford a replay of 1917. I'm confident that this time around we won't.

Arevordi

March, 2014

***

Crimea, Sevastopol officially join Russia as Putin signs final decree

Russia has finalized the legal process of taking Crimea under its
sovereignty, as President Putin signed a law amending the Russian
constitution to reflect the transition. Earlier Russian lawmakers ratified both the amendment and an
international treaty with Crimea and the city of Sevastopol,
which was legally required for the incorporation. Following the signing of the law, Putin thanked lawmakers and
everyone involved in the historic change of European borders for
their efforts to make it happen.

“I ask lawmakers of both chambers to work actively and do
everything we can, to make the transition process not only
painless, but also beneficial for all Russia and the people of
Crimea,” Putin said.

The treaty and the bill were submitted for the approval of
Russian lawmakers on Tuesday by Putin, following last week’s
referendum in Crimea, which showed the overwhelming support of
the peninsula’s residents for joining Russia. The actual transition of Crimea to existing under Russian laws
and regulations may take until next year. Local rules in the new
Russian region will be changed to adopt the ruble, social
benefits, tax requirements and other Russian legislation.

As was promised by the Crimean authorities, the treaty includes
preferences for the region’s ethnic minorities, particularly
Crimean Tatars and Ukrainians. Their languages would be official
in Crimea, on par with Russian. Russia pledged to make the process as smooth as possible by
offering funding and recognizing various Ukrainian documents,
which were in force in Crimea before it declared its independence
last week.

Moscow will retain military ranks and academic levels for
Ukrainian troops who choose to serve Russia, give preference to
Ukrainian officials who want to keep their positions in Crimea,
and expedite the issuance of Russian citizenship to all residents
of Crimea who want it. Citizenship would be given automatically
to all except those who explicitly opt out of it no later than
one month’s time. The current interim authorities of Crimea will be replaced with
new ones after elections, which will be held in September 2015.

Crimea’s rejoining Russia was triggered by an armed coup in Kiev,
which ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanokovich from power.
The new authorities took some alarming steps, including
parliament passing a law revoking the regional status of the
Russian language, which caused the predominantly Russian region
to defy Kiev.

The public uprising in Crimea culminated in a referendum, in
which an overwhelming majority of over 96 percent voted in favor
of asking for reunification with Russia. Moscow agreed, citing
the will of the people and the historic justice of the move as
its motives.

Kiev and Western countries deemed Crimea’s secession and Russia’s
acceptance of the peninsula illegal, a notion that Moscow denies.
The US and the EU issued sanctions against some Russian officials
and businessmen in a bid to put pressure on Russia over its
stance on the Ukrainian crisis. Russian authorities mostly
mocked the sanctions.

‘Crimea is now part of Russia, the West has to come to terms with that’

Claiming that Crimea is part of Ukraine is the same as Serbia arguing
that Kosovo is not really separated from it, Gregory Copley, editor of
Defense & Foreign Affairs, told RT.

“Crimea is now part of Russia, the West will come to terms
with that, the question is how much longer they’ll perpetuate the
crisis in the rest of Ukraine and whether they will escalate the
problem, which I think will be unwise for the US and Western
European interests,” Copley said.

Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's Chief of Staff, goes further,
saying that as long as Crimea belongs to Russia, Ukraine should
be made a buffer zone between the West and Russia.

“This is a serious situation that will be alleviated with
recognition that Russia and Crimea are going to be together, a
recognition that the Ukraine should be a buffer state between let
it say NATO, the West, and Russia, and a recognition on the
Russian side that that’s the case and Ukraine is left alone, and
the same thing on the Western side,” Wilkerson argued.

He blames the US for the creation of the artificial crisis, which
resulted in downgrading relations between great world powers
whereas their cooperation in other spheres is so needed.

“Obviously it’s not working the way we were trying to make it
work, which is largely the US’s fault that they try to extend
NATO well beyond NATO's proprietary distance, and its ability to
handle an alliance that was spread all the way to Kiev, to
Tbilisi. This is absurd. We started this mess, we knew (we should
have known if we had a brain) that Russia would react to it, now
Russia has reacted, let’s come down, let’s handle it like the
great powers we’re supposed to be,” Lawrence Wilkerson told
RT.

Gregory Copley also highlights another aspect of this issue,
namely US financial programs aimed at boosting color revolutions.
He claims that the 2004 Orange revolution was one of the examples
of these programs.

“What the US and the EU have done over the past decade or
more has been to fund the color revolution in Ukraine in 2004,
etc., and the subsequent outbreaks recently, which have led to
this present situation. And if they had the ability to act more
overtly, they would have done so. They’ve instead chosen to act
through street protests and indirect sociological warfare to
mobilize the Western Ukrainians to seize power when they were not
able to do so electorally,” he said.

Copley also added that there is “an indication that the US
and the EU have had no way to go and they say they don’t wish to
engage Russia militarily.”

“It’s not to say that they could prevail ultimately in a
military confrontation with Russia, that’s not the point. The
point is why do you want to do it over a prize which is perhaps
not worth having if you are NATO or the EU or the US?” he
told RT.

Anyone with good knowledge of the post-Soviet neighborhood and time
to think things through should have guessed that Russia would have acted
to prevent the interim government of Ukraine from decisively anchoring
their country to the West. The separation of Crimea could be just the
Kremlin’s first move in what Vladimir Putin rightly sees as a long game.

Disastrous Lack of Foresight

It goes without saying that leaders both in Kiev and Western capitals
must have displayed an astounding lack of foresight if they thought
that Ukraine’s interim government could steer the country toward the
West and Vladimir Putin would do little in response, other than impose
sanctions and rattle his sabre.

It was also short-sighted on the part of the interim government in
Kiev to hope that of the Russian-speaking population of eastern and
southeastern Ukraine would happily accept an outcome, in which a
victorious coalition excludes their representatives, but includes
ultranationalists; fires their governors, and passes a bill to cancel
the status of their mother tongue.

The leaders of the interim government also failed to anticipate that
Moscow would respond to ramblings in the south and east in ways that
they would not be able to neutralize with or without support from
Ukraine’s Western partners.

Russian diplomats have been lately criticized for restoring the
Soviet habit of “whataboutism,” but I too cannot help wondering what
would have been the reaction of Western governments if protesters had
built barricades in downtown Brussels or Berlin or Washington and stayed
there for months, battling police, throwing Molotov cocktails and
shooting. Would Western leaders have recognized an outcome in which a
legitimately elected president of a West European country is ousted by[3]what some describe[3] as “rebels-protesters” rather than voted out or impeached? I guess these are all rhetorical questions.

I was also surprised how quickly some of the Western governments
embraced the interim government after the deal that they themselves
brokered between Viktor Yanukovych and opposition on February 21
collapsed, forcing the Ukrainian president (who, by the way, came to
power in 2010 elections that observers of the Organization for Security
and Cooperation in Europe found to be[4]transparent and honest[4]) to flee out of fear for his life.

I am not saying Yanukovych didn't discredit and incriminate himself
through massive corruption, abuses and, use of deadly force against the
protesters. And precisely because of these abuses he would have probably
lost internationally observed early elections stipulated by the
February 21 agreement and faced prosecution. As a result, the moderate
opposition could have come to power peacefully in a democratic process
that not only Western governments, but also Russia could live with. As I[5]warned[5]
hours after the deal was sealed, it should be honored because the
alternative could be ensuing chaos that would lead to disintegration of
Ukraine.

But as much as the Western support encouraged Yanukovych's opponents,
it is the latter that are ultimately responsible for prompting Russia’s
leadership to spring into action. Vladimir Putin had remained observant
as long as the most likely scenario was that there would be an early
election in which Viktor Yanukovych would compete against Yulia
Tymoshenko. But once that scenario became improbable—after Yanukovych
was forced out by a coalition, which excluded representatives of
pro-Russian regions, but included anti-Russian ultranationalists—Putin
felt compelled to act.

And the interim government’s very first steps gave him an excuse, if
not a plausible reason, to intervene. These steps did a lot to stoke
worries of the Russian-speaking population of the eastern and southern
provinces and nothing to alleviate Moscow's worries that Ukraine might
first integrate first into West's economic structures, and then
eventually enter into a political-military alliance with the West.

Military Intervention Can Not Be Justified and Will Not Be Without Cost for Russia

Of course, only a few expected that Russia would respond to
developments in Kiev with a covert military intervention in Crimea that
allowed the pro-Russian majority in Crimea to vote on secession from
Ukraine. I did[6]acknowledge[6]
such a possibility, but I didn't quite expect it to happen. I also
thought then and continue to think now that a military intervention
cannot be justified in absence of flagrant and massive violation of
human rights.

I have no doubts that Crimea’s ethnic Russian majority wants to be
part of Russia and so do many Russians, given the blood Russian soldiers
spilled conquering and defending the peninsula over the course of many
centuries. It is no accident that Putin’s popularity has soared in the
aftermath of the recent events. But any surge in popularity might prove
to be short-lived while longer-term economic and political costs of
taking over Crimea could be significant.

If the current stand-off escalates into a Cold War redux between
Russia and West, then the latter will still continue to buy Russian
resources as it did during the original Cold War. But Western
governments can also revive some of the Cold War era restrictions on
exports of equipment and technologies Russia needs to modernize and
diversify its economy.

China has made impressive strides in many technological fields,
leading the world in manufacturing of solar cells and wind turbines.
But, overall, the Middle Kingdom continues to lag behind the West
technologically. Therefore, Beijing won't be able to compensate if West
restricts exports of technologies and equipment to Russia. Nor should
Russia count for China’s full support in the case of Crimea, given
Beijing’s own problems with separatism. Beijing’s ambivalent attitude
became clear last weekend when[9]China abstained during a vote at the United Nations Security Council[9] on a resolution introduced by its Western members to declare the referendum in Crimea unlawful.

As for post-Soviet republics that have decided to distance themselves
from Russia, NATO would now have less qualms about accepting Moldova
and Georgia. (Georgia’s membership in the alliance would partially
negate whatever advantages Russian strategists see in solidifying
control of the naval facilities in Crimea.) And, of course, violation of
Russia's own commitments in the 1994 Budapest memorandum on security
assurances for Ukraine undermines the supremacy of international law
that Russia had been championing for so many years. More importantly, it
sets yet another precedent of secession, which Russia may come to face
if it weakens, reducing the cost of secession for some of its ethnic
republics.

Russia Still Has Aces to Play, Even Against a Crimea-Less Ukraine

Nevertheless, Moscow was bound to respond to developments in Kiev one
way or another. And it should not have taken a rocket scientist to
calculate that Russia has huge overt and covert leverage of nonmilitary
nature vis-a-vis Ukraine, which it wouldn’t hesitate to use it if
antagonized.

Leonid Kuchma (who, by the way, was a rocket scientist) had his own
serious flaws, but at least he understood the need to balance between
Moscow, Brussels, and Washington without committing to any of them, and
he did so rather skillfully. Yanukovych at least tried to follow the
same policy. He did it less skilfully than his mentor Kuchma (if only
because he was blinded by his and his retinue’s greed), but at least he
tried. As for the leaders of the opposition that topped Yanukovych, they
didn't even try to pursue a balanced policy, antagonizing Moscow. So
they should not be that surprised that the Crimea has slipped out of
their hands.

And if these leaders think Russia would stop after separation of the
Crimea, then they might be wrong. Yes, Putin did pledge in his Tuesday
speech that Russia doesn’t plan to further split up Ukraine. But he also
vowed to defend Russian speakers in Ukraine’s east, if needed.

And Putin still has some aces, including pro-Russian moods in eastern
and southeastern Ukraine and Kiev’s dependence on trade with Russia,
that he can play against a Crimea-less Ukraine, if given a reason (or an
plausible excuse) to intervene. For instance, if repeated on a larger scale and with greater
violence, the recent clashes between locals and pro-Western activists in
the eastern provinces can prompt Russia to intervene there.

Russia can also curtail trade with Ukraine on a scale no hikes in
trade with EU would able to compensate for. Russia supplies more than 60
percent of Ukraine's gas and is the source of half of raw materials
that Ukraine imports. Russia is also by far the largest importer of
goods and services from Ukraine.Putin would be more likely to play these cards if he concludes that a
new Cold War is unavoidable and Russia won't lose much more from
pursuing an even more expansive policy vis-a-vis Ukraine.

Time for Kiev to Display Foresight

Leaders of the interim government in Kiev should finally start
exercising some badly needed foresight to anticipate what disruptive
moves Moscow can make next and how they can realistically preempt such
moves. Or they will risk losing de facto control over parts of eastern
Ukraine.

Such a loss would, of course, would be condemned by Western countries
and their allies. But by now Kiev probably knows that condemnations
don’t stop Russia and that neither the United States nor its allies
would enter a military conflict with Russian forces to restore Ukraine’s
territorial integrity (there was a reason why the Budapest memorandum
contains assurances rather than guarantees of Ukraine’s security).

Taking and holding a high moral ground in international affairs is
important, but not as important as holding one’s ground literally.

Now, of course, some argue that membership in NATO represents a
shortcut to Ukraine’s territorial integrity, but chances are that the
republic may lose some of parts of eastern and southeastern provinces
before Article 5 of the Washington Treaty could be applied to Kiev. And I
myself held the view that Ukraine’s membership in NATO was not
improbable. But that was in the early 2000s, when Vladimir Putin was
himself making inquiries whether Russia could be invited into NATO. That
opportunity has been lost.

Yet, there are a number of steps that Ukrainians can take to hold their home ground even outside NATO.[11]Codifying Ukraine’s military-political neutrality[11]
and status of the Russian language in the Constitution in short-term
and strengthening Ukraine’s statehood, increasing independence of its
economy and reinforcing capabilities of its military in the longer-term
could be among those steps.

It would be as important for the Ukrainian elites and public both in
the short and long term to stick to defeating their political opponents
at polling stations rather than on the streets. The revolution (this is
the third attempt to stage a revolution in post-Communist Ukraine) must
make way for a politically cohesive, economically viable, stable and
neutral (but military capable) state, one whose neighbors have neither
reason nor excuse to intervene against.

Simon Saradzhyan is assistant director of the U.S.-Russia
Initiative to Prevent Nuclear Terrorism and a research fellow at Harvard
Kennedy School’s Belfer Center. His research interests include
international arms control, counter-terrorism, foreign, defense, and
security policies of Russia and other post-Soviet states and their
relations with great powers.

When, on February 21st, Washington decided to default on the
agreement signed between Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich and the
so-called “democratic opposition,” including Neo-Nazis, it finally crossed the red line.Washington has defaulted on all of its key agreements made
with USSR/Russia during the last 30 years. Gorbachev was promised that
Eastern Europe would not be taken into NATO. Country by country, it
became part of NATO, and Yugoslavia was dismantled despite Russia’s
objections. The US acted as the winner of the Cold War and guided its
policies by the famous principle of “Vae victis!” Woe to the vanquished!The “hawks” in Washington think they can push Russia around
indefinitely, that Russia, in order to become an “accepted partner” in
the West, would still try to negotiate, be diplomatic and peaceful. Washington’s defaulting on an explicit agreement regarding Ukraine’s
future and the prospect of NATO troops on the ground in Ukraine finally
convinced Vladimir Putin and a big part of the Russian elite that there
is no point in negotiating with the US. It means that from now on, no
compromises are possible.For America, the situation in Ukraine is a geopolitical game, another
opportunity to hurt Russia’s interests. For Russia, it’s not a
geopolitical game. It’s a matter of national identity, it’s an ethnic
matter. Almost every Russian I know has relatives in Ukraine. Roughly a
third of Russian senators and members of the government were born in
Ukraine.Dmitry Yarosh, the leader of the biggest neo-Nazi group in Ukraine, issued a statement
in which he called on Russia’s most wanted Chechen terrorist, Doku
Umarov, to commit acts of terrorism in Russia. “Many Ukrainians with
arms in the hands” had supported Chechen militants in their fight
against Russians, the statement said, but “it is time to support Ukraine
now.”

What would have happened to a warlord somewhere who called on
Al-Qaeda to commit acts of terrorism in the US? He would have been
killed by a drone strike without international warrant or court
decision. If the US does this, then other countries are entitled to act
in a similar manner.

The fact that the neo-Nazi leaders and their soldiers haven’t been
disarmed despite the EU-brokered agreement signed on February 21st
proves that they and not the “official government” are actually in
control of the situation. But the US doesn’t care about the fate of the
Russians who don’t want to live in a neo-Nazi-led state. The US wants to
dislodge Russia from the region, and nothing else matters.There are rumors circulating in the expert community in Moscow – and I
have strong reasons to believe they’re true – that the decision to
tackle the Crimean issue was taken by Putin personally. He has full
support from a number of top officials, especially from the army and the
secret services, who have no assets and no business abroad that can be
seized by the US. Also, in 2013, the Parliament passed a law barring
Russian officials from owning assets, except real estate, outside
Russia. So, the officials whose assets will be frozen by the US
sanctions are criminals under Russian law anyway – and Putin might even
welcome the move.The hard-liners in the Kremlin have received a tremendous boost from
the US. Now, everyone who advocates for a softer stance on Ukraine and
everyone who advocates for an “agreement with the US” is looked upon as
too stupid to understand that Washington won’t honor its end of the
bargain or as paid by Washington to lead Russia into another agreement
that will once again be broken. America has lost most if not all of its
ranking sympathizers or allies in Russia because they are either
actively shunned or because they have to be silent.

Putin’s ratings are at two-year highs. Even his fiercest critics
understand that his involvement in Ukraine has tremendous popular
support. He will no longer have to cater to the needs of the pro-Western
community. He is now supported not only by his usual conservative
electorate, but also by the communists and nationalists who like his
decisive actions and his disregard for America’s objections.

From the economic point of view, everyone should get ready for tough
actions from Moscow. Sergei Glazyev, the most hardline of Putin’s
advisors, sketched the retaliation strategy: Drop the dollar, sell US
Treasuries, encourage Russian companies to default on their
dollar-denominated debts, and create an alternative currency system
(reference currency) with the BRICS and hydrocarbon producers like
Venezuela and Iran.Of course, some “anonymous sources” told RIA Novosti and Reuters that
Glazyev was speaking “as an academic” and not in his official capacity,
but it must be pointed out that those sources didn’t dare identify
themselves. On the other hand, Glaziev’s projects more often than not
become the cornerstone of Putin’s external policy, including the Customs
Union and the Eurasian Union.The Western media ignore another key supporter of hardline economic
measures, Putin’s ally and trusted friend, Rosneft president Igor
Sechin. At last October’s World Energy Congress in Daegu, South Korea,
Sechin suggested that it was “advisable to create an international
stock-exchange for the participating countries, where transactions could
be registered with the use of regional currencies.”Until February 21st, Moscow was content with the slow expansion of
its economic sphere of influence. Now, the hard-liners have the
possibility to go all in and pursue their radical projects and
strategies. Here, in Moscow, almost everyone is certain that we’ll see a rerun of
the “Georgian war” and that Crimea will be attacked by Ukrainian army
at some point before March 16th. If you’re a trader, sitting on the
fence for a week or putting on some hedges may be a very good idea.By Valentin Mândrăşescu, Editor of The Voice of Russia’s Reality Check. Former
commodity trader, economist, journalist. Nomadic lifestyle. When not in
Moscow, he can be found travelling across Eastern Europe.

Lots of stern-faced Western politicians and so-called
experts have been asking: what is Russian President Vladimir Putin's endgame in Ukraine? The
presence of Russian troops in Crimea has sent alarm bells ringing in
Western capitals, with some people predicting that it is basically a
prelude to a full-blown invasion of predominantly Russian speaking
eastern parts of the country,
with Russian tanks rolling in.Calls were also made for the "world
community," whatever that means these days, to punish Russia
economically and diplomatically, although no one is talking about any
military response.

Very
hard to see though how Western countries can exert serious economic
pressure on Russia, considering the state of their economies and
possible huge losses they will incur. Symbolically, yes, they can, say,
cancel some business conferences and maybe even refuse to sign a deal or
two. But that would be all.
We have already found out the British government is not considering any
military options or trade sanctions after a
cunning cameramen picked up an official carrying a policy document near
10 Downing Street, zooming in on the relevant paragraph.

Although,
as a former Kremlin adviser, I can tell you that such things don't
happen by accident and usually have all to do with sending out a signal
to those who are watching carefully. Other countries have also signaled
their lack of any desire to resort to sanctions.

U.S.
President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have been
warning Russia about costs and punishments, if it does not withdraw its
troops back to the Black Sea naval base in Sevastopol. The White House
has been saying that economic sanctions against Russia are in the making
and that all military programs between the two countries are on hold.
Other suggested punishments being looked at include boycotting the G8
summits in Sochi in June and even banning Russia altogether from this
gathering, which, incidentally, has been losing its relevance in the
past decade or so. I mean, who is going to treat seriously the supposed
group of the biggest industrial nations if it doesn't include China and
India but has Canada and Italy in it, no offence to these two great
nations.

The
thing about the crisis in Ukraine is that the West has greatly
misjudged the way Russia would respond to the possibility of its
neighbor sliding into chaos and anarchy, with the so-called interim
unity government in Kiev failing to establish its authority in the east
and south of the country. Not to mention that the children of the Orange
revolution of 2004, which, by the way, eventually ended in tears for
most of them, have swallowed more than they can chew when they toppled
President Viktor Yanukovich, and then made a crucial mistake of making
all the wrong noises from day one, demonstrating open hostility to
Russia and to the ethnic Russians living in Ukraine.

And when the dust began to settle in Kiev and news emerged that out of the 98 people who died, at least 16 were police officers, the image of a glorious people's revolution somehow lost its initial
appeal. And
with the failed attempts by some extremists to spread the influence of
the interim government to the east and south, using intimidation and
violence, it became clear that a prospect of a civil war looked very
real indeed.

So
here's the deal then: as Ukraine was slipping into anarchy and chaos,
with all sorts of radicals causing mayhem, President Putin's endgame
became obvious. He needed to do anything in his power to prevent Ukraine
from becoming
another Iraq, with a possibility of a civil war breaking out and
violence spreading to Russia at some point.

We
should learn the lessons of Iraq where the delicate balance, which had
existed there before the U.S.-led invasion of 2003, was undermined and
no one now knows how to resolve it. The same outcome happened as a
result of the
so-called revolution in Kiev that has now opened up old wounds and
awoken historical animosities that had been kept in check.

So Putin has chosen to use the 25,000 Russian troops based at Sevastopol, reinforcing them with another 16,000 soldiers, to prevent clashes between radicals on all sides erupting and provide stability in Crimea where about 60% of the population are
ethnic Russians. Without a shot being fired, so unlike the rest of the
country, law and order have been established. All the Ukrainian
military installations in Crimes were surrounded by Russian troops with
one purpose: to prevent undesirables arming themselves, like it happened
in Lviv and some other cities, with disastrous circumstances. Up to now the plan has worked.

But
any suggestions that the Kremlin is actually ready to start a
full-blown invasion of Ukraine are way, way off the mark. This would be
very dangerous for Russia itself, considering it close links with
Ukraine on all levels. So the hysteria surrounding the Russian
involvement in Crimea at the moment is either caused by ignorance or is a
result of the deep suspicions that the West still
has about Russia, Cold War or no Cold War.

A
sudden regime change that has happened in Ukraine could never result in
a swift and peaceful resolution. We saw that during the Arab Spring
and, less recently, in the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. That is
why all sides in the Ukrainian crisis need to keep a cool head and
refrain from one-sided propaganda and provocative, inflammatory
statements. If one thing that we have learned for history it's that it
doesn't take a lot for a big war to erupt in Europe, dragging the rest
of the world in it.

Obama gambled that U.S. power would trump Russia's interests in Ukraine. He was wrong

The
Obama administration was clearly taken by surprise when Russia decided
to seize Crimea by force. The real question,
however, is why Obama and his advisors thought the United States and
the European Union could help engineer the ouster of a democratically
elected and pro-Russian leader in Ukraine and expect Vladimir Putin to
go along with it? This remarkable combination of hubris and naiveté is
even more striking when one considers that Washington has few, if any, options to counter Putin's move.

To
be sure, ousted
president Viktor Yanukovych was corrupt and incompetent and the United
States and the European Union didn't create the protests that rose up
against him. But instead of encouraging the protestors to stand down and
wait for unhappy Ukrainians to vote Yanukovych out of office, the
European Union and the United States decided to speed up the timetable
and tacitly support the anti-Yanukovych forces. When the U.S. assistant
secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs is on the streets
of Kiev handing out pastries
to anti-government protestors, it's a sign that Washington is not
exactly neutral. Unfortunately, enthusiastic supporters of "Western"
values never stopped to ask themselves what they would do if Russia
objected.

There's plenty of room for finger-pointing and blame casting here, but the taproot of the debacle in Ukraine was a failure to
distinguish between power and interests.
Power is a useful thing to have in
international politics, but any serious student of foreign
policy knows that the stronger side does not always
win. If it did, the United States would have won
in Vietnam, would have persuaded India,
Pakistan, and North Korea not to test nuclear weapons,
and would have Afghan President Hamid
Karzai dancing to our tune.
In the real world,
however, weaker states often care more about the outcome than stronger
states do and are therefore willing to run more risks and incur larger
costs to get what they want.

Unfortunately,
U.S. leaders have repeatedly lost
sight of this fact since the end of the Cold War.
Because the United States is so powerful and so
secure, it can meddle in lots of places without
putting its own security at risk. United States
officials tend to think they have the answer to every
problem, and they reflexively assume that helping
other societies become more like us is
always the "right thing to
do." Because we've
become accustomed to our self-appointed role as Leader of the Free
World, Washington is quick to proclaim redlines and issue high-minded
demands, convinced that others will do its bidding -- if it barks loudly
enough.

Unfortunately,
America's remarkably favorable geopolitical position also means that
the outcome of many global disputes don't matter all that much to
Washington, and still less to the American people. The result is a
paradox: primacy allows the United States to interfere in lots of global
disputes, but many of the issues it gets involved in are of secondary
importance and not worth much risk, blood, or treasure. Why? Because the
United States will be fine no matter how things turn out. It has the
power to act almost anywhere, but its vital interests are rarely fully
engaged.

That is certainly the case in Ukraine, a country whose entire economy is about the size of Kentucky's. Last year, total U.S. trade with
Ukraine was a measly $3 billion, less than the city budget of
Philadelphia and about .00018 percent of America's gross
domestic product (GDP). Ukraine's political
system has been a mess ever since independence in 1991
and its economy is nearly bankrupt and
needs massive outside
assistance. It would be
nice if Ukraine developed effective political institutions, but neither
the security nor prosperity of the United States depend on that
happening, either now or in the foreseeable future. Put simply: Ukraine
is not an arena on which America's future depends in the slightest.

For
Russia, however, the situation vis-à-vis
Ukraine is quite different. Russia is much, much
weaker than the United States -- in every
significant dimension of national power -- and its
long-term demographic and economic prospects are not
bright. That is why any prudent Russian
leader would want friendly
regimes on its borders
and would be sensitive about any area where ethnic Russians are a
significant fraction of the population. Ukraine is right next door,
there are deep historical ties between the two countries, and ethnic Russians account forabout 20 percent of Ukraine's population and nearly 60 percent
of the population in Crimea. Add to that mix Russia's naval base in
Sevastopol and you can see why Putin sees the retention of Russian
influence there as a vital interest indeed.

Moreover,
Russia has spent the last 20-plus years watching the United States and
its European allies expand NATO eastward and deploy ballistic missile
defenses there, to boot, with near-total disregard for Russian interests
and complaints. Because Americans never see themselves as potential
aggressors and haven't had a great power in their own hemisphere for
over a century, they have trouble imagining how these acts looked from
Moscow's vantage point. But any good realist could have told you that
Russia would regard these developments as a long-term security
challenge. Imagine how Washington would react if a powerful China were
one day to cultivate close security ties with Canada or Mexico, and
you'll appreciate Putin's perspective a bit more.

Not
only is Ukraine much more important to Moscow, its geographic proximity
made it easy for Putin to act as he did and makes it hard for us to do
anything about it. News flash: Ukraine
and Russia share a long border, and Crimea is
thousands of miles from the United States. Russia may
not be a global military power (its defense
spending is about one-sixth the size of the U.S.
defense budget), but it is strong enough to occupy
Crimea. The United States and NATO aren't going to
assemble an expeditionary force to push them out,
so don't expect to see a replay of the 1991
liberation of Kuwait. The bottom line:Putin was never going to
see Obama's warnings as
more than just a hollow bluff.

Mind
you: I'm not defending Putin's action or relishing Obama's
discomfiture. No one
should take pleasure from this unilateral violation
of international law or the likelihood that
Ukraine faces more years of political instability and
economic hardship. Nor should we neglect the
possible fallout from this blunder in other areas --
such as the ongoing negotiations with Iran -- as
the GOP is certain to seize upon this incident to
cast doubt on the administration's entire
approach to foreign policy. I just wish
someone in the administration
had thought this through
before they decided to help ease Yanukovych out of power. Did we really
think that power politics was no longer relevant in the 21st century,
and that the spread of democracy, free markets, rule of law, and all
that other good stuff meant that other states were no longer willing to
defend their own security interests?

Sadly,
this case provides another vivid reminder of
why tough-minded realism is a better guide to
foreign policy than feckless liberal idealism or
neoconservative bluster. Since 1992, the U.S.
approach to Russia and Eastern Europe has been
guided by the assumption
that Western-style
democracy was the wave of the future and that the United States could
extend its reach eastward and offer security guarantees to almost anyone
who wanted them, but without ever facing a serious backlash. Even after
the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia revealed the limits to what
Moscow would tolerate and what the West could impose, some U.S. leaders
continued to think they could draw more former Soviet bloc states into
America's orbit without provoking stiff Russian resistance.

By
contrast, realism tells you
major powers care a lot about security
and are often ruthless in
defending vital
interests, especially close to home. It recognizes that great powers
ignore international law when it gets in their way (as the United States
has done repeatedly), and it sees relations between major powers as a
ceaseless struggle for position, even when that struggle is waged for
essentially defensive reasons. Realists also know that diplomatic
contests have no finish line and that every foreign policy initiative
inevitably invites a counter-move. It's for this reason that those
responsible for foreign policy need to think two or three moves ahead:
"If we take this step, what are other states likely to do and what will
our options look like then?"

Nobody
in Washington or Brussels seems to have asked that question as they
watched (and helped) Ukraine unravel, and that's why their options today
are limited to angry denunciations and symbolic protests. It's possible
that Putin has bitten off more than Russia can comfortably swallow, and
the economic
costs may prove to be too much for the fragile
Russian economy to bear. But great powers are usually
willing to suffer when their security is on the
line, and that's likely to be the case here. If
you thought the era of power politics was behind us, think again.

The external struggle to dominate Ukraine has put fascists in power and brought the country to the brink of conflict

Diplomatic pronouncements are renowned for hypocrisy and double
standards. But western denunciations of Russian intervention in Crimea
have reached new depths of self parody. The so far bloodless incursion
is an "incredible act of aggression",
US secretary of state John Kerry declared. In the 21st century you just
don't invade countries on a "completely trumped-up pretext", he
insisted, as US allies agreed that it had been an unacceptable breach of
international law, for which there will be "costs".That the
states which launched the greatest act of unprovoked aggression in
modern history on a trumped-up pretext – against Iraq, in an illegal war now estimated to have killed 500,000,
along with the invasion of Afghanistan, bloody regime change in Libya,
and the killing of thousands in drone attacks on Pakistan, Yemen and
Somalia, all without UN authorisation – should make such claims is
beyond absurdity.

It's not just that western aggression and
lawless killing is on another scale entirely from anything Russia
appears to have contemplated, let alone carried out – removing any
credible basis for the US and its allies to rail against Russian
transgressions. But the western powers have also played a central role
in creating the Ukraine crisis in the first place.

In her notorious "fuck the EU" phone call
leaked last month, the US official Victoria Nuland can be heard laying
down the shape of a post-Yanukovych government – much of which was then
turned into reality when he was overthrown after the escalation of
violence a couple of weeks later.

The president had by then lost
political authority, but his overnight impeachment was certainly
constitutionally dubious. In his place a government of oligarchs, neoliberal Orange Revolution retreads and neofascists
has been installed, one of whose first acts was to try and remove the
official status of Russian, spoken by a majority in parts of the south
and east, as moves were made to ban the Communist party, which won 13%
of the vote at the last election.

It has been claimed that the
role of fascists in the demonstrations has been exaggerated by Russian
propaganda to justify Vladimir Putin's manoeuvres in Crimea. The reality is alarming enough to need no exaggeration.
Activists report that the far right made up around a third of the
protesters, but they were decisive in armed confrontations with the
police.

Neo-Nazis in
office is a first in post-war Europe. But this is the unelected
government now backed by the US and EU. And in a contemptuous rebuff to
the ordinary Ukrainians who protested against corruption and hoped for
real change, the new administration has appointed two billionaire
oligarchs – one who runs his business from Switzerland – to be the new
governors of the eastern cities of Donetsk and Dnepropetrovsk.
Meanwhile, the IMF is preparing an eye-watering austerity plan for the
tanking Ukrainian economy which can only swell poverty and unemployment.

From
a longer-term perspective, the crisis in Ukraine is a product of the
disastrous Versailles-style break-up of the Soviet Union in the early
1990s. As in Yugoslavia, people who were content to be a national
minority in an internal administrative unit of a multinational state –
Russians in Soviet Ukraine, South Ossetians in Soviet Georgia – felt
very differently when those units became states for which they felt
little loyalty.

In the case of Crimea, which was only transferred
to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s, that is clearly true for
the Russian majority. And contrary to undertakings given at the time,
the US and its allies have since relentlessly expanded Nato up to
Russia's borders, incorporating nine former Warsaw Pact states and three
former Soviet republics into what is effectively an anti-Russian
military alliance in Europe. The European association agreement which
provoked the Ukrainian crisis also included clauses to integrate Ukraine
into the EU defence structure.

Given
that background, it is hardly surprising that Russia has acted to stop
the more strategically sensitive and neuralgic Ukraine falling
decisively into the western camp, especially given that Russia's only
major warm-water naval base is in Crimea.

Clearly, Putin's
justifications for intervention – "humanitarian" protection for Russians
and an appeal by the deposed president – are legally and politically
flaky, even if nothing like on the scale of "weapons of mass
destruction". Nor does Putin's conservative nationalism or oligarchic
regime have much wider international appeal.

But Russia's role as a
limited counterweight to unilateral western power certainly does. And
in a world where the US, Britain, France and their allies have turned
international lawlessness with a moral veneer into a permanent routine,
others are bound to try the same game.

Fortunately, the only shots
fired by Russian forces at this point have been into the air. But the
dangers of escalating foreign intervention are obvious. What is needed
instead is a negotiated settlement for Ukraine, including a broad-based
government in Kiev shorn of fascists; a federal constitution that
guarantees regional autonomy; economic support that doesn't pauperise
the majority; and a chance for people in Crimea to choose their own
future. Anything else risks spreading the conflict.

The West
is blinking in disbelief – Vladimir Putin just invaded
Ukraine. German diplomats, French Eurocrats and American pundits are all
stunned. Why has Russia chosen to gamble its trillion-dollar ties with
the West?

Western leaders are stunned because they haven’t realized
Russia’s owners no longer respect Europeans the way they once did after
the Cold War. Russia thinks the West is no longer a crusading alliance.
Russia thinks the West is now all about the money.

Putin’s
henchmen know this personally. Russia’s rulers have been buying up
Europe for years. They have mansions and luxury flats from London’s West
End to France’s Cote d’Azure. Their children are safe at British
boarding and Swiss finishing schools. And their money is squirrelled
away in Austrian banks and British tax havens.

Putin’s inner circle no longer fear the European establishment.
They once imagined them all in MI6. Now they know better. They have seen
firsthand how obsequious Western aristocrats and corporate tycoons
suddenly turn when their billions come into play. They now view them as
hypocrites—the same European elites who help them hide their fortunes.

Once
Russia’s powerful listened when European embassies issued statements
denouncing the baroque corruption of Russian state companies. But no
more. Because they know full well it is European bankers, businessmen
and lawyers who do the dirty work for them placing the proceeds of
corruption in hideouts from the Dutch Antilles to the British Virgin
Islands.

We are not talking big money. But very big money. None
other than Putin’s Central Bank has estimated that two thirds of the $56
billion exiting Russia in 2012 might be traceable to illegal
activities. Crimes like kickbacks, drug money or tax fraud. This is the
money that posh English bankers are rolling out the red carpet for in
London.

Behind European corruption, Russia sees American
weakness. The Kremlin does not believe European countries – with the
exception of Germany – are truly independent of the United States. They
see them as client states that Washington could force now, as it once
did in the Cold War, not to do such business with the Kremlin.

When Russia sees Spain, Italy, Greece and Portugal outbidding each
other to be Russia’s best business partner inside the EU (in return for
no mention of human rights), they see America’s control over Europe
slowly dissolving.

Back in Moscow, Russia hears American weakness
out of Embassy Moscow. Once upon a time the Kremlin feared a foreign
adventure might trigger Cold War economic sanctions where it hurts:
export bans on key parts for its oil industry, even being cut out of its
access to the Western banking sector. No more.

Russia sees an
America distracted: Putin’s Ukrainian gambit was a shock to the U.S.
foreign policy establishment. They prefer talking about China, or
participating in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. Russia sees an America
vulnerable: in Afghanistan, in Syria and on Iran—a United States that
desperately needs Russian support to continue shipping its supplies,
host any peace conference or enforce its sanctions.

Moscow is not
nervous. Russia’s elites have exposed themselves in a gigantic manner –
everything they hold dear is now locked up in European properties and
bank accounts. Theoretically, this makes them vulnerable. The EU could,
with a sudden rush of money-laundering investigations and visa bans, cut
them off from their wealth. But, time and time again, they have watched
European governments balk at passing anything remotely similar to the
U.S. Magnitsky Act, which bars a handful of criminal-officials from
entering the United States.

All this has made Putin confident,
very confident – confident that European elites are more concerned about
making money than standing up to him. The evidence is there. After
Russia’s strike force reached the outskirts of Tbilisi, the Georgian
capital, in 2008, there were statements and bluster, but not a squeak
about Russia’s billions. After Russia’s opposition were thrown into show
trials, there were concerned letters from the European Union, but again
silence about Russia’s billions.

The Kremlin thinks it knows
Europe’s dirty secret now. The Kremlin thinks it has the European
establishment down to a tee. The grim men who run Putin’s Russia see
them like latter-day Soviet politicians. Back in the 1980s, the USSR
talked about international Marxism but no longer believed it. Brussels
today, Russia believes, talks about human rights but no longer believes
in it. Europe is really run by an elite with the morality of the hedge
fund: Make money at all costs and move it offshore.

The
Kremlin sees its evidence in the former leaders of Britain, France and
Germany. Tony Blair now advises the dictatorship in Kazakhstan on how to
improve its image in the West. Nicholas Sarkozy was contemplating
setting up a hedge fund with money from absolutist Qatar. And Gerhard
Schroder is the chairman of the Nord Stream consortium – a majority
Gazprom-owned pipeline that connects Russia directly to Germany through
the Baltic Sea.

Russia is confident there will be no Western
economic counterattack. They believe the Europeans will not sanction the
Russian oligarch money. They believe Americans will not punish the
Russian oligarchs by blocking their access to banks. Russia is certain a
military counterattack is out of the question. They expect America to
only posture. Cancel the G-8? Who cares?

Because Putin has no
fear of the West, he can concentrate on what matters back in Russia:
holding onto power. When Putin announced he would return to the
presidency in late 2011, the main growling question was: why?

The
regime had no story to sell. What did Putin want to achieve by never
stepping down? Enriching himself? The puppet president he shunted aside,
Dmitry Medvedev, had at least sold a story of modernization. What,
other than hunger for power, had made Putin return to the presidency?
The Kremlin spin-doctors had nothing to spin.

Moscow was rocked
by mass protests in December 2011. More than 100,000 gathered within
sight of the Kremlin demanding Russia be ruled in a different way. The
protesters were scared off the streets, but the problem the regime had
in justifying itself remained. Putin had sold himself to the Russian
people as the man who would stabilize the state and deliver rising
incomes after the chaos of the 1990s. But with Russians no longer
fearing chaos, but rather stagnation as the economy slowed – it was
unclear what this “stability” was for.

This is where the grand
propaganda campaign called the Eurasian Union has come into its own.
This is the name of the vague new entity that Putin wants to create out
of former Soviet states — the first steps toward which Putin has taken
by building a Customs Union with Belarus and Kazakhstan, and he had
hoped with a Ukraine run by Viktor Yanuvokych. This is not just about
empire; it is about using empire to cover up the grotesque scale of
Russian corruption and justify the regime.

Russia would rather
have swallowed Ukraine whole, but the show must go on. Russian TV needs
glories for Putin every night on the evening news. Russian politics is
about spin, not substance. The real substance of Russian politics is the
extraction of billions of dollars from the nation and shuttling them
into tropical Western tax havens, which is why Russian politics needs
perpetual PR and perpetual Putinist drama to keep all this hidden from
the Russian people. Outraged Putin has built up a Kremlin fleet of
luxury aircraft worth $1 billion? Angry that a third of the $51 billion
budget of the Sochi games vanished into kickbacks? Forget about it.
Russia is on the march again.

This is why Crimea is perfect
Putin. Crimea is no South Ossetia. This is not some remote, mountainous
Georgian village inhabited by some dubious ethnicity that Russians have
never heard of. Crimea is the heart of Russian romanticism. The
peninsula is the only part of the classical world that Russia ever
conquered. And this is why the Tsarist aristocracy fell in love with it.
Crimea symbolized Russia’s 18th and 19th-century fantasy to conquer
Constantinople and liberate Greek Orthodox Christians from Muslim rule.
Crimea became the imperial playground: In poetry and palaces, it was
extolled as the jewel in the Russian crown.

Crimea is the only
lost land that Russians really mourn. The reason is tourism. The Soviet
Union built on the Tsarist myth and turned the peninsula into a giant
holiday camp full of workers sanitariums and pioneer camps. Unlike, the
Russian cities of say northern Kazakhstan, Crimea is a place Russians
have actually been. Even today over one million Russians holiday in
Crimea every year. It is not just a peninsula; this is Russia’s Club Med
and imperial romanticism rolled into one.

Vladimir Putin knows
this. He knows that millions of Russians will cheer him as a hero if he
returns them Crimea. He knows that European bureaucrats will issue
shrill statements and then get back to business helping Russian elites
buy London town houses and French chateaux. He knows full well that the
United States can no longer force Europe to trade in a different way. He
knows full well that the United States can do nothing beyond theatrical
military maneuvers at most. This is why Vladimir Putin just invaded Crimea. He thinks he has nothing to lose.

Ben Judah is author of Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In And Out Of Love With Vladimir Putin.

As
Russia and the United States drift toward a rupture over Crimea, the
Stalinist writer Aleksandr A. Prokhanov feels that his moment has
finally arrived.

“I
am afraid that I am interested in a cold war with the West,” said Mr.
Prokhanov, 76, in a lull between interviews on state-controlled
television and radio. “I was very patient. I waited for 20 years. I did
everything I could so that this war would begin. I worked day and
night.”

Mr.
Prokhanov is an attack dog whose career has risen, fallen and risen
again with the fortunes of hard-liners in the Kremlin. And it is a
measure of the conservative pivot that has taken place in Moscow in
Vladimir V. Putin’s third presidential term that Mr. Prokhanov and a
cadre of like-minded thinkers — a kind of “who’s who of conspiratorial
anti-Americanism,” as one scholar put it — have found themselves thrust
into the mainstream.

For
centuries, Russian history has been driven by a struggle between ideas,
as reformers and revanchists wrestled over the country’s future. Mr.
Putin keeps a distance from the ideological entrepreneurs clustered
around the Kremlin, leaving his influences a matter of speculation.

But
it became clear last week, as the United States threatened to cut off
Russian corporations from the Western financial system, that influential
members of the president’s inner circle view isolation from the West as
a good thing for Russia, the strain of thought advanced by Mr.
Prokhanov and his fellow travelers. Some in Mr. Putin’s camp see the
confrontation as an opportunity to make the diplomatic turn toward China
that they have long advocated, said Sergei A. Karaganov, a dean of the
faculty of international relations at the Higher School of Economics in
Moscow.

“This
whole episode is going to change the rules of the game,” Mr. Karaganov
said of Crimea, which is holding a referendum on secession on Sunday.
“Confrontation with the West is welcomed by all too many here, to
cleanse the elite, to organize the nation.”

When
he took power in Russia, Mr. Putin seemed intent on balancing the
voices of strong-state nationalists and promarket liberals, among them
the tycoons entrusted with Russia’s corporate empires. That balance flew
out the window in 2012, and with the Crimean crisis the space for
liberal dissent has been melting away, a process that accelerated
Thursday when the Russian authorities blocked websites used by prominent
opposition figures.

Mr.
Prokhanov, for one, was flush with victory. His dingy office and tiny,
extremist newspaper belie ties to Russia’s security services, which have
long employed “agitators” to whip up support for their initiatives. His
writing about the invasion of Afghanistan earned him the nickname
“nightingale of the General Staff.” In 1991, he co-wrote the manifesto
that was published to support an attempted coup by hard-line Communists
who were opposed to Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms.

His
views have been more or less consistent for years: that the Soviet
Union should be restored, by force if necessary; that America “consumes
country after country” and must be prevented from devouring Russia. As
recently as 2003, his newspaper received a government warning for
publishing material deemed “extremist.” But Mr. Putin’s recent return to
the presidency, he said, has been accompanied by “a strong ideological
mutation.”

Mr.
Prokhanov, who speaks in rich, metaphorical Russian and has the
slightly disheveled look of a beat poet, contrasted the present
government with that of Boris Yeltsin, the president in the 1990s. “In
Yeltsin’s time I was seen as a monster by the regime, a character out of
hell,” he said. “I was under threat of arrest, and now I am regularly
invited to Kremlin events.”

Though
he said he had met the president only a handful of times, “The
intelligence officers around him pay much more attention to ideology,
and for them it is clear that ideological war is an important
instrument.”

If
Mr. Putin himself decided to make an ideological change, Mr. Prokhanov
said, it was in December 2011, when tens of thousands of urban liberals,
angry over ballot-stuffing and falsification in parliamentary
elections, massed on a city square, Bolotnaya, chanting, “Putin is a
thief!” and “Russia Without Putin.”

“During
the time of Bolotnaya, he experienced fear,” Mr. Prokhanov said. “He
felt that the whole class which he had created had betrayed him, cheated
him, and he had a desire to replace one class with another. From the
moment you got back from that march, we started a change of the Russian
elite.”

Another
person who has been swept into the mainstream is one of Mr. Prokhanov’s
former protégés, Aleksandr G. Dugin, who, in the late 1990s, called for
“the blinding dawn of a new Russian Revolution, fascism — borderless as
our lands, and red as our blood.”

Virulently
anti-American, Mr. Dugin has urged a “conservative revolution” that
combines left-wing economics and right-wing cultural traditionalism. In a
1997 book, he introduced the idea of building a Eurasian empire
“constructed on the fundamental principle of the common enemy,” which he
identified as Atlanticism, liberal values, and geopolitical control by
the United States.

Building
a Eurasian economic bloc, including Ukraine, became a central goal for
Mr. Putin upon his return to the presidency. His point man on the
project was the economist Sergei Glazyev, an associate of Mr.
Prokhanov’s and Mr. Dugin’s.

In
an interview, Mr. Dugin was evasive when asked about his personal
contact with Mr. Putin, saying only that he had been “in close contact
with the Kremlin, and with those in the Kremlin who make decisions,” for
the last 15 years. But he said the president, whom he described as a
Henry Kissinger-style “pragmatist,” had embraced a version of his
ideology because it served his interests domestically.

“It
is popular, it is populist, it helps to explain all the processes which
are going on in the country, and gradually — just by the logic of
things, pragmatically, he becomes closer and closer to this ideology,
just by the logic of events,” he said. He also offered a more human
reason: that Mr. Putin had been stung by Western leaders’ apparent
preference for his predecessor, Dmitri A. Medvedev, and then by the
antigovernment protests that he believed were backed by the West.

Though
a number of high-ranking officials around Mr. Putin have argued
strenuously against this ideological shift, Mr. Dugin said that their
influence had been waning steadily, and that the Crimean crisis left
them no option but to “be quiet, or gather up their suitcases and leave
Russia.”

“Anti-Americanism
has become the main ideology, the main worldview among Russians,” he
said. “Now, after Crimea, we have passed the point of no return. There
will not be another Medvedev. There will never be another ‘reset,’
ever.”

Ideological
mouthpieces have been used to send signals since the Soviet days — as a
warning to adversaries or domestic dissenters — and it would be foolish
to assume that Mr. Putin subscribes to their views. But there are
important stakeholders who, faced with the threat of sanctions last
week, have advocated that Russia cut itself off from the West.

The most
obvious among them is Vladimir I. Yakunin, president of Russian Railways
and one of Mr. Putin’s trusted friends, who in a recent interview with
The Financial Times described the struggle against a “global financial
oligarchy” and the “global domination that is being carried out by the
U.S.” On Tuesday, Mr. Yakunin presented plans for a Soviet-style
megaproject to develop transportation and infrastructure in Siberia, a
move toward “an economics of a spiritual type,” he said, that would
insulate Russia from the West’s alien values.

He
compared the project to monumental endeavors from the past: the
adoption of Christianity in ancient Rus; the conquest of Siberia;
electrification of the Soviet Union; the Soviet space program; and the
Olympics in Sochi. A
shift in planning to Siberia, Mr. Karaganov said, “has already been
proclaimed, and is happening,” in part to weaken the Western influence
on Russia’s elites, who are seen as “too dependent on their holdings in
the West.”

Dimitri
K. Simes, president of the Center for the National Interest, said he
saw the rise of people “who have very different views about the Russian
economy.”

“Hard-line
people, more nationalist people, they are being energized, they think
this may be their moment,” he said. “You can also say that this is the
tip of the iceberg. These are people who are more visible, more obvious,
but there is a lot behind them that is potentially more serious and
more ominous.”

Russian troops took over a strategic region in Ukraine as the
parliament in Moscow gave President Vladimir Putin a green light
Saturday to proceed to protect Russian interests. The newly installed
government in Kiev was powerless to react to the swift takeover of
Crimea by Russian troops already in Ukraine and more flown in, aided by
pro-Russian Ukrainian groups.

A
few hours after Putin was cleared by parliament to use military force
on Ukrainian soil, Interfax news agency reported that two Russian
anti-submarine warships have appeared off the coast of the Crimea
region, violating an agreement on Moscow's lease of a naval base. The
report quoted a Ukrainian military source who said that two vessels,
part of Russia's Baltic Fleet, had been sighted in a bay at Sevastopol,
where Russia's Black Sea Fleet has a base.

Putin's move follows U.S. President Barack Obama's warning Friday "there will be costs"
if Russia intervenes militarily, sharply raising the stakes in the
conflict over Ukraine's future and evoking memories of Cold War
brinkmanship. The explicit reference to the use of troops escalated days
of conflict between the two countries, which started when Ukraine's
pro-Russian president was pushed out by a protest movement of people who
wanted closer ties to the European Union.

"I'm
submitting a request for using the armed forces of the Russian
Federation on the territory of Ukraine pending the normalization of the
socio-political situation in that country," Putin said in his request
sent to parliament.

Putin's
call came as pro-Russian demonstrations broke out in Ukraine's
Russian-speaking east, where protesters raised Russian flags and clashed
with supporters of the new Ukrainian government. Russia's upper house
also recommended that Moscow recall its ambassador from Washington over
Obama's comments. Ukraine
had already accused Russia on Friday of a "military invasion and
occupation" of the Crimea peninsula, where Russia's Black Sea fleet is
based.

Ukrainian
Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk called on Moscow "to recall their
forces, and to return them to their stations," according to the Interfax
news agency. "Russian partners, stop provoking civil and military
resistance in Ukraine."

The
crisis was sparked when Ukraine's deposed president, Victor Yanukovych,
ditched a deal for closer ties to the EU and instead turned toward
Moscow. Months of protests followed, culminating in security forces
killing dozens of protesters and Yanukovych fleeing to Russia. Ignoring
Obama's warning, Putin said the "extraordinary situation in Ukraine"
was putting at risk the lives of Russian citizens and military personnel
stationed at a naval base that Moscow has maintained in the Black Sea
peninsula since the Soviet collapse.

Reflecting
a degree of caution, Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin, who
presented Putin's request to the upper house, told reporters that the
motion doesn't mean that the president would immediately send additional
troops to Ukraine. "There is no talk about it yet," he said. Putin's
spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said in remarks on Rossiya 24 television that
while the president "got the entire arsenal of means necessary for
settling this situation," he hadn't yet decided whether to use the
Russian military in Ukraine or recall the ambassador from Washington.

"He
will make these decisions depending on how the situation will develop,"
Peskov said. "We would like to hope that the situation will not develop
along the scenario it's developing now — that is inciting tensions and
making a threat for the Russians on the Crimean Peninsula."

The
UN Security Council called an urgent meeting on Ukraine on Saturday,
and the European Union foreign ministers will hold an emergency meeting
Monday to discuss the crisis. Putin's
motion loosely refers to the "territory of Ukraine" rather than
specifically to Crimea, raising the possibility that Moscow could use
military force in other Russian-speaking areas in eastern and southern
Ukraine, where many oppose the new authorities in Kiev. Pro-Russian
protests were reported in the eastern cities of Kharkiv, Donetsk and
Luhansk and the southern port of Odessa.

In
Kharkiv, 97 people were injured in clashes between pro-Russia
demonstrators and supporters of the new Ukrainian government, according
to the Interfax news agency. Ukraine's
population is divided in loyalties between Russia and Europe, with much
of western Ukraine advocating closer ties with the European Union while
eastern and southern regions look to Russia for support. Crimea, a
semi-autonomous region of Ukraine, is mainly Russian-speaking.

In
Saturday's parliamentary session in Moscow, a deputy house speaker said
Obama had insulted Russia and crossed a "red line," and the upper house
recommended the Russian ambassador in Washington be recalled. It will
be up to Putin to decide whether that happens. In
Crimea, the pro-Russian prime minister who took office after gunmen
seized the regional Parliament claimed control of the military and
police there and asked Putin for help in keeping peace, sharpening the
discord between the two neighboring Slavic countries.

Ukraine's
acting president, Oleksandr Turchynov, said the election of Sergei
Aksyonov as prime minister of Crimea was invalid. Ukrainian
officials and some Western diplomats said that a Russian military
intervention is already well underway after heavily armed gunmen in
unmarked military uniforms seized control of local government buildings,
airports and other strategic facilities in Crimea in recent days.

Crimea
only became part of Ukraine in 1954 when Soviet leader Nikita
Khrushchev transferred jurisdiction from Russia, a move that was a mere
formality when both Ukraine and Russia were part of the Soviet Union.
The Soviet breakup in 1991 meant Crimea landed in an independent
Ukraine.

Russia
put pressure on Ukraine from another direction when a spokesman for
state gas company Gazprom said that Ukraine owed $1.59 billion in
overdue bills for imported gas. Sergei Kuprianov was quoted by the
RIA-Novosti agency as saying the gas arrears would endanger a recent
discount granted by Russia. The discount lowered the price to $268.50
per thousand from other $400. The Russian payment demand and loss of the
discount would accelerate Ukraine's financial crisis. The country is
almost broke and seeking emergency credit from the International
Monetary Fund.

Russia
has taken a confrontational stance toward its southern neighbor after
Yanukovych fled the country. Yanukovych was voted out of office by
parliament after weeks of protests ended in violence that left more than
80 people dead. Aksyonov, the Crimea leader, appealed to Putin "for
assistance in guaranteeing peace and calmness on the territory of the
autonomous republic of Crimea."

Aksyonov
was voted in by the Crimean parliament on Thursday after pro-Russia
gunmen seized the building and as tensions soared over Crimea's
resistance to the new authorities in Kiev, who took office this week. Obama
called on Russia to respect the independence and territory of Ukraine
and not try to take advantage of its neighbor, which is undergoing
political upheaval. He
said such action by Russia would represent a "profound interference" in
matters he said must be decided by the Ukrainian people.

"The
United States will stand with the international community in affirming
that there will be costs for any military intervention in Ukraine," he
said. Obama did not say what those costs might be. Swedish
Foreign Minister Carl Bildt wrote on Twitter that it was "obvious that
there is Russian military intervention in Ukraine. Likely immediate aim
is to set up puppet pro-Russian semi-state in Crimea."

At
the United Nations, the Ukrainian ambassador, Yuriy Sergeyev, said
Friday that Russian transport aircraft and 11 attack helicopters had
arrived in Crimea illegally, and that Russian troops had taken control
of two airports in Crimea. He described the gunmen posted outside the
two airports as Russian armed forces as well as "unspecified" units.

Russia
has kept silent on claims of military intervention and has said any
troop movements are within agreed rules, even as it maintained its
hard-line stance on protecting ethnic Russians in Crimea. Meanwhile,
flights remained halted from Simferopol's airport. Dozens of armed men
in military uniforms without markings patrolled the area. They didn't
stop or search people leaving or entering the airport, and refused to
talk to journalists.

To many in Ukraine, a
full-scale Russian military invasion would feel like a liberation. On
Saturday, across the country’s eastern and southern provinces, hundreds
of thousands of people gathered to welcome the Kremlin’s talk of
protecting pro-Russian Ukrainians against the revolution that brought a
new government to power last week. So far, that protection has come in
the form of Russian military control of the southern region of Crimea,
but on Saturday, Russian President Vladimir Putin
got parliamentary approval for a broad military intervention in
Ukraine. As that news spread, locals in at least four major cities in
the east of Ukraine climbed onto the roofs of government buildings and
replaced the Ukrainian flag with the Russian tricolor.

For the most part, what drove so many people to renounce their
allegiance to Ukraine was a mix of pride and fear, the latter fueled in
part by misinformation from Moscow. The most apparent deception came on Saturday morning, when the Russian Foreign Ministry put out a statement
accusing the new government in Kiev of staging a “treacherous
provocation” on the Crimean Peninsula. It claimed that “unidentified
armed men” had been sent from Kiev to seize the headquarters of the
Interior Ministry police in Crimea. But thanks to the “decisive actions
of self-defense battalions,” the statement said, the attack had been
averted with just a few casualties. This statement turned out to be
without any basis in fact.

Igor Avrutsky, who was the acting Interior Minister of Crimea during
the alleged assault, told TIME the following afternoon that it never
happened. “Everything was calm,” he says. Throughout the night,
pro-Russian militiamen armed with sticks and shields had been defending
the Crimean Interior Ministry against the revolutionaries, and one of
the militia leaders, Oleg Krivoruchenko, also says there was no assault
on the building. “People were coming and going as normal,” he says.

But the claims coming from Moscow were still enough to spread panic
in eastern and southern Ukraine. On Saturday, pro-Russian activists in
the Crimean capital of Simferopol staged a massive demonstration in the
city, calling on residents to rally against the “Nazi authorities” who
had come to power in Kiev. “What’s happening in Ukraine is terrifying,”
says one of the organizers of the march, Evgenia Dobrynya. “We’re in a
situation now where the country is ruled by terrorists and radicals.”

That is the picture of Ukraine’s new government propagated in the Russian media,
the main source of information for millions of people in eastern and
southern Ukraine. For months, Russian officials and television networks
have painted the revolutionaries as a fascist cabal intent on stripping
ethnic Russians of their rights. Much of the coverage has amounted to
blatant scaremongering. The key posts in the new government, including
the interim President and Prime Minister, have gone to pro-Western
liberals and moderates, and they have pledged to guarantee the rights of
all ethnic minorities. But some of their actions have given Russia
plenty of excuses to accuse them of doing the opposite.

Within two days of taking power, the revolutionary leaders passed a
bill revoking the rights of Ukraine’s regions to make Russian an
official language alongside Ukrainian. That outraged the
Russian-speaking half of the country, and the ban was quickly lifted.
But the damage was done. With that one ill-considered piece of
legislation, the new leaders had convinced millions of ethnic Russians
that a wave of repression awaited them. So it was no surprise on Friday
when a livid mob in Crimea attacked a liberal lawmaker who came to
reason with them. Struggling to make his case over the screaming throng,
Petro Poroshenko was chased back to his car amid cries of “Fascist!”

Making matters worse has been the role of nationalist parties in the
new government, including a small but influential group of right-wing
radicals known as Pravy Sektor (Right Sector), which embodies some of
the greatest fears of Ukraine’s ethnic Russian minority. Its leader, Dmitro Yarosh,
has openly referred to Russia as the “centuries-old enemy of Ukraine”
and has spent years training a small paramilitary force to fight what he
calls “Russian imperialist ambitions.”

In the past week, Ukraine’s new leaders have been scrambling to
figure out what to do with Yarosh. His role in the revolution was too
significant for them to write him off. Having suffered dozens of
casualties in fighting off police during deadly clashes in Kiev last
month, his militia members are idolized as heroes by many supporters of
the revolution across the country. “It’s a real problem,” says the
pro-Western lawmaker Hrihory Nemiriya, whose fellow members of the
Fatherland party now hold the interim presidency and premiership. “Right
Sector people are very popular, but they are not in the government.”

Yarosh has, however, been offered top positions in Ukraine’s security
structures. Zoryan Shkiryak, a revolutionary lawmaker involved in the
negotiations over Yarosh’s role in the government, says the right-wing
militant was in the running to become Deputy Prime Minister overseeing
the security services. “That was on the table,” Shkiryak tells TIME.
After much debate, Yarosh was offered the role of deputy head of the
National Security Council, but rejected it as beneath him. In his only interview
with the Western press, Yarosh told TIME last month that he planned to
turn Right Sector into a political party and run for office. “He could
run for President,” adds Nemiriya.

Even that possibility has been enough to horrify the Russians in the
east and the south, and Moscow has played on those fears to claim that
Nazis are coming to power. On Saturday, when Putin asked his upper house
of parliament to allow
an invasion of Ukraine, the lawmakers had no trouble coming up with a
justification. “What’s happening in Ukraine is a true mutiny, a plague
of brownshirts,” said one of the Senators, Nikolai Ryzhkov.

In the Crimean capital of Simferopol, that logic took hold. Thousands
of people marched through the streets of the city on Saturday carrying
enormous Russian flags and chanting “Fascism will not pass!” Dobrynya,
the organizer, said her greatest concern was the role of Right Sector in
the new government. “We’re supposed to accept these radicals deciding
who is going to rule Ukraine? That can’t happen. So thank God we have
these wonderful guardians now,” she said, gesturing toward the battalion
of Russian marines who were guarding the Crimean parliament building.
In four other cities of eastern Ukraine, major demonstrations called for
Russia to send similar contingents to protect them from the “fascists.”
Now, with the approval of his obedient legislature, Putin seems ready
to oblige, surely comforted by the fact that cheering crowds would come
out to greet the Russian tanks if they do roll over the border into
eastern Ukraine.

Russia signalled for the first time on Friday that it was prepared to
annex Ukraine's Crimea region, significantly intensifying its
confrontation with the West over the political crisis in Ukraine and
threatening to undermine a system of respect for national boundaries
that has helped keep the peace in Europe and elsewhere for decades.

Leaders
of both houses of Russia's Parliament said they would support a vote by
Crimeans to break away from Ukraine and become a region of the Russian
Federation, ignoring sanction threats and warnings, from the United
States and other countries, that a vote for secession would violate
Ukraine's Constitution and international law. The Russian message was
yet another in a series of political and military actions undertaken
over the past week that outraged the West, even while the Kremlin's
final intentions remained unclear.

As fresh tensions flared
between Russian and Ukrainian forces in Crimea, the moves by Russia
raised the specter of a protracted conflict over the status of the
region, which Russian forces occupied last weekend, calling into
question not only Russia's relations with the West but also post-Cold
War agreements on the sovereignty of the nations that emerged from the
collapse of the Soviet Union.

The developments underscored how
quickly the crisis has evolved. Earlier this week, President Vladimir
Putin of Russia had said he did not foresee the possibility of the
Crimean Peninsula becoming part of Russia, but on Friday Russia's
parliamentary leaders, both strong allies of Putin's, welcomed a
delegation from Crimea's regional assembly and declared that they would
support a vote to break away from Ukraine, now scheduled for March 16.

The
referendum - barely a week away - has been denounced by the fledgling
national government in Kiev, which said it would invalidate the outcome
and dissolve the Crimean Parliament. President Barack Obama has also
rejected the referendum, and the U.S. government announced sanctions
Thursday in response to Russia's de facto military occupation.

Russia
denounced those sanctions in a blunt rejoinder Friday evening, posted
on the Foreign Ministry website. The statement said Russia's foreign
minister, Sergei V. Lavrov, had spoken by telephone with U.S. Secretary
of State John Kerry and warned that "hasty and ill-considered steps" to
impose sanctions on Russian officials "would inevitably backfire on the
United States itself."

Russia's Interfax news agency reported
that Lavrov and Kerry would soon meet again. A senior State Department
official traveling with Kerry, who was flying back to Washington after a
trip to Europe and the Middle East, confirmed Kerry had spoken with
Lavrov, but said it was unclear when they would meet again.

The
Russians also sent menacing economic signals to the financially strapped
interim central government in Kiev, which Russia has refused to
recognize. Gazprom, the Russian natural gas monopoly, which supplies
Ukraine with most of its gas, warned that it might shut off supplies
unless Ukraine paid $1.89 billion owed to the company.

Gazprom
cut off gas to Ukraine for nearly two weeks in January 2009, causing
severe economic problems for Ukraine and for other European customers
who were dependent on supplies delivered through Ukraine.

Valentina
I. Matviyenko, chairwoman of the upper house of the Russian Parliament,
the Federation Council, compared the planned referendum in Crimea to
Scotland's scheduled vote on whether to become independent from Britain.
She did not mention that the national government in Britain had agreed
to hold a referendum, while the Ukrainian government has not.

The
speaker of the Russian lower house, Sergei Y. Naryshkin, echoed
Matviyenko's remarks. "We will respect the historic choice of the people
of Crimea," he said.

Their assertions came a day after Crimea's
regional assembly voted in a closed session to secede from Ukraine and
apply to join the Russian Federation, and to hold a referendum for
voters in the region to ratify the decision. On Friday, a delegation of
lawmakers from Crimea arrived in Moscow to lay the groundwork for
joining Russia, strongly supported by senior lawmakers.

In
another telling sign of Russian government support, the Crimean
delegates were cheered at an officially sanctioned rally in central
Moscow that was shown at length on Russian state television, with songs
and chants of "Russia, Moscow, Crimea." News agencies quoted the police
as saying 60,000 had people attended.

Even if the referendum
proceeds, it was unclear what would happen next, given the wide gap
between the positions of Russia and the West - most notably between
Putin and Obama, who spoke for an hour by phone Thursday night.

According
to the White House, Obama urged Putin to authorize direct talks with
Ukraine's new government, permit the entry of international monitors and
return his forces to the bases that Russia leases in Crimea.

In a
statement, the Kremlin offered a starkly different account of the phone
call, emphasizing Russia's view that the new government in Kiev had no
authority because it was the result of what Putin called an
"anti-constitutional coup" last month that had ousted Viktor Yanukovych,
the pro-Kremlin president.

The official Russian account of the
phone call went on to say that the current Ukrainian leadership had
imposed "absolutely illegitimate decisions" on the eastern and
southeastern regions of the country, where pro-Russia sentiment is
widespread. "Russia cannot ignore appeals connected to this, calls for
help, and acts appropriately, in accordance with international law," the
statement said.

In the United States, Obama was taking a
wait-and-see attitude. He spoke by phone to Chancellor Angela Merkel of
Germany, which has been reluctant to pursue muscular sanctions against
Russia because of the deep and interwoven economic relationship between
the two countries. He traveled to Florida for an education speech and
then a weekend off with his family, but aides promised that he would be
monitoring the crisis.

"We're hopeful that in the next few days,
we'll get greater clarity about whether or not the Russians are willing
to take some concrete steps toward this off-ramp here," said Josh
Earnest, a White House spokesman.

In Kiev, anti-Russian sentiment
was hardening. The Right Sector movement, a nationalist group that was
important in the deadly protests last month that drove Yanukovych from
power, announced that its leader, Dmytro Yarosh, would run for
president. Andriy Tarasenko, chairman of its local branch, also said the
group was prepared to fight, in Crimea and elsewhere, "if the Kremlin
tramples on us further."

With Washington and Moscow trading
heated accusations of hypocrisy on the issue of respecting state
sovereignty, validating Crimea's secession would carry pointed political
risks for Putin, given longstanding demands for independence from
Russia by its own similarly autonomous republics in the Caucasus,
including Dagestan and Chechnya.

Michael A. McFaul, a former U.S.
ambassador to Russia, noted the parallel in a sharp post on Twitter.
"If Russian government endorses Crimean referendum," McFaul wrote, using
abbreviations needed for a 140-character limit, "will they also
allow/endorse similar votes in republics in the Russian Federation?"

The
West, which has insisted that the Ukrainian people are entitled to
decide their future without interference from Russia, faces similar
challenges as it seeks to explain why the people of Crimea should not
necessarily decide their own fate.

The United States and its
European allies typically support self-determination, but have opposed
independence for regions within their own borders, like Scotland in
Britain or Catalonia in Spain.

There was no sign Friday that
Russian armed forces were relaxing their tight clench on the Crimean
Peninsula, with military bases surrounded and border crossings under
strict control. There were news reports late Friday that pro-Russian
militants had smashed through the gates of a Ukrainian air force base in
the port of Sevastopol housing 100 Ukrainian troops, but that no shots
had been fired. There were also reports that a number of Ukrainian
journalists had been beaten by masked attackers and were missing.

For
the second consecutive day, an observer mission from the Organization
for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the 57-member organization that
includes Ukraine and Russia, was prevented from entering Crimea at a
checkpoint blocked by armed men.

Astrid Thors, an OSCE envoy who
had gone to Crimea earlier in the week, said in a telephone interview
from Amsterdam that she had faced noisy, threatening crowds chanting
pro-Russian slogans during her visit and had been forced to leave.
Thors, the OSCE's high commissioner for national minorities, said she
could have experienced the sort of predicament faced by a senior U.N.
diplomat, Robert H. Serry, who was chased out of Crimea by gunmen this
week.

"There was a risk the same could happen, that our movement
could be hindered by the crowds," Thors said. "We took precautionary
principles. We shortened our stay."

Russia executed a de facto
military takeover of a strategic region in Ukraine as the parliament in
Moscow gave President Vladimir Putin a green light Saturday to proceed
to protect Russian interests. The newly installed government in Kiev was
powerless to react to the swift takeover of Crimea by Russian troops
already in Ukraine and more flown in, aided by pro-Russian Ukrainian
groups. Putin's move
follows President Barack Obama's warning Friday "there will be costs" if
Russia intervenes militarily, sharply raising the stakes in the
conflict over Ukraine's future and evoking memories of Cold War
brinkmanship. The explicit reference to the use of troops escalated days
of conflict between the two countries, which started when Ukraine's
pro-Russian president was pushed out by a protest movement of people who
wanted closer ties to the European Union.

"I'm
submitting a request for using the armed forces of the Russian
Federation on the territory of Ukraine pending the normalization of the
socio-political situation in that country," Putin said in his request
sent to parliament.

Putin's
call came as pro-Russian demonstrations broke out in Ukraine's
Russian-speaking east, where protesters raised Russian flags and clashed
with supporters of the new Ukrainian government. Russia's upper house
also recommended that Moscow recall its ambassador from Washington over
Obama's comments. Ukraine
had already accused Russia on Friday of a "military invasion and
occupation" of the Crimea peninsula, where Russia's Black Sea fleet is
based. Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk called on Moscow "to
recall their forces, and to return them to their stations," according to
the Interfax news agency. "Russian partners, stop provoking civil and
military resistance in Ukraine."

The crisis was sparked when
Ukraine's deposed president, Victor Yanukovych, ditched a deal for
closer ties to the EU and instead turned toward Moscow. Months of
protests followed, culminating in security forces killing dozens of
protesters and Yanukovych fleeing to Russia. Ignoring
Obama's warning, Putin said the "extraordinary situation in Ukraine"
was putting at risk the lives of Russian citizens and military personnel
stationed at a naval base that Moscow has maintained in the Black Sea
peninsula since the Soviet collapse. Reflecting
a degree of caution, Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin, who
presented Putin's request to the upper house, told reporters that the
motion doesn't mean that the president would immediately send additional
troops to Ukraine. "There is no talk about it yet," he said. Putin's
spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said in remarks on Rossiya 24 television that
while the president "got the entire arsenal of means necessary for
settling this situation," he hadn't yet decided whether to use the
Russian military in Ukraine or recall the ambassador from Washington.

"He will make these
decisions depending on how the situation will develop," Peskov said. "We
would like to hope that the situation will not develop along the
scenario it's developing now — that is inciting tensions and making a
threat for the Russians on the Crimean Peninsula."

The
U.N. Security Council called an urgent meeting on Ukraine on Saturday,
and the European Union foreign ministers will hold an emergency meeting
Monday to discuss the crisis. Putin's
motion loosely refers to the "territory of Ukraine" rather than
specifically to Crimea, raising the possibility that Moscow could use
military force in other Russian-speaking areas in eastern and southern
Ukraine, where many oppose the new authorities in Kiev. Pro-Russian
protests were reported in the eastern cities of Kharkiv, Donetsk and
Luhansk and the southern port of Odessa.

In
Kharkiv, 97 people were injured in clashes between pro-Russia
demonstrators and supporters of the new Ukrainian government, according
to the Interfax news agency. Ukraine's
population is divided in loyalties between Russia and Europe, with much
of western Ukraine advocating closer ties with the European Union while
eastern and southern regions look to Russia for support. Crimea, a
semi-autonomous region of Ukraine, is mainly Russian-speaking.

In
Saturday's parliamentary
session in Moscow, a deputy house speaker said Obama had insulted Russia
and crossed a "red line," and the upper house recommended the Russian
ambassador in Washington be recalled. It will be up to Putin to decide
whether that happens. In
Crimea, the pro-Russian prime minister who took office after gunmen
seized the regional Parliament claimed control of the military and
police there and asked Putin for help in keeping peace, sharpening the
discord between the two neighboring Slavic countries. Ukraine's acting
president, Oleksandr Turchynov, said the election of Sergei Aksyonov as
prime minister of Crimea was invalid.

Ukrainian
officials and some Western diplomats said that a Russian military
intervention is already well underway after heavily armed gunmen in
unmarked military uniforms seized control of local government buildings,
airports and other strategic facilities in Crimea in recent days. Crimea
only became part of Ukraine in 1954 when Soviet leader Nikita
Khrushchev transferred jurisdiction from Russia, a move that was a mere
formality when both Ukraine and Russia were part of the Soviet Union.
The Soviet breakup in 1991 meant Crimea landed in an independent
Ukraine.

Russia put pressure on
Ukraine from another direction when a spokesman for state gas company
Gazprom said that Ukraine owed $1.59 billion in overdue bills for
imported gas. Sergei Kuprianov was quoted by the RIA-Novosti agency as
saying the gas arrears would endanger a recent discount granted by
Russia. The discount lowered the price to $268.50 per thousand from
other $400. The Russian payment demand and loss of the discount would
accelerate Ukraine's financial crisis. The country is almost broke and
seeking emergency credit from the International Monetary Fund.

Russia
has taken a confrontational stance toward its southern neighbor after
Yanukovych fled the country. Yanukovych was voted out of office by
parliament after weeks of protests ended in violence that left more than
80 people dead. Aksyonov, the Crimea leader, appealed to Putin
"for assistance in guaranteeing peace and calmness on the territory of
the autonomous republic of Crimea." Aksyonov was voted in by the Crimean
parliament on Thursday after pro-Russia gunmen seized the building and
as tensions soared over Crimea's resistance to the new authorities in
Kiev, who took office this week. Obama
called on Russia to respect the independence and territory of Ukraine
and not try to take advantage of its neighbor, which is undergoing
political upheaval. He said
such action by Russia would represent a "profound interference" in
matters he said must be decided by the Ukrainian people.

"The United States will
stand with the international community in affirming that there will be
costs for any military intervention in Ukraine," he said. Obama did not
say what those costs might be. Swedish
Foreign Minister Carl Bildt wrote on Twitter that it was "obvious that
there is Russian military intervention in Ukraine. Likely immediate aim
is to set up puppet pro-Russian semi-state in Crimea."

At
the United Nations, the Ukrainian ambassador, Yuriy Sergeyev, said
Friday that Russian transport aircraft and 11 attack helicopters had
arrived in Crimea illegally, and that Russian troops had taken control
of two airports in Crimea. He described the gunmen posted outside the
two airports as Russian armed forces as well as "unspecified" units.
Russia
has kept silent on claims of military intervention and has said any
troop movements are within agreed rules, even as it maintained its
hard-line stance on protecting ethnic Russians in Crimea. Meanwhile,
flights remained halted from Simferopol's airport. Dozens of armed men
in military uniforms without markings patrolled the area. They didn't
stop or search people leaving or entering the airport, and refused to
talk to journalists.

The City Council in the eastern city of Donetsk has refused to
recognize Ukraine’s self-imposed government and called for a referendum
on the region’s status. The council has made Russian alongside Ukrainian
the official language in the region.

“Until all the legitimacy of the new laws approved by
Verkhovna Rada [Ukrainian Parliament] is clarified, the City
Council [of Donetsk] will take full responsibility for its
territories,” said the document approved by Donetsk City
Council during the special session of March, 1. The report comes
from Ukraine-based Zerkalo Nedeli newspaper.

Donetsk is the capital of the coal-rich Donbass region in eastern
Ukraine. Beside Donetsk, a major economic, industrial and
scientific center, Donbass includes Lughansk and Dnepropetrovsk
regions. The Council called for a referendum on Donbass’s future, urging
the local parliament to set the date immediately. The move is set
to “protect the citizens from possible violent actions on the
behalf of radicalized nationalistic forces,” the council
said in a statement.

In addition, the members of the city council have voted to set up
self-defense squads. Russian language has been re-introduced as an official language
along with Ukrainian in the area where a plurality of its
residents are ethnic Russians (48.15%) and Russian-speaking
Ukrainians (46.65%). This decision came after the new power in
Kiev abolished the minority languages law. Also, the Donetsk authorities said they consider Russia a
strategic partner.

The council’s session was called as pro-Russian activists
gathered in the center of Donetsk, demanding local authorities to
hold a referendum on the future of the region. The protesters
seized the regional administration building and hoisted the
Russian flag above it. Eastern Ukraine and Crimea are seeing massive pro-Russian
demonstrations against the new self-proclaimed central
government, with many government buildings being topped with
Russian flags.Source: http://rt.com/news/ukraine-donetsk-protests-referendum-383/

Thousands of pro-Russian demonstrators across eastern Ukraine and
Crimea are protesting against the new government, with administration
buildings being seized in several cities. Gunshots have been reported as
anti- and pro-Maidan protesters clash. Protesters in Kharkov and Donetsk stormed local government
offices and removed Ukrainian flags, replacing them with the
Russian tricolor on Saturday.

Between 7,000 to 10,000 demonstrators gathered in the center of
Donetsk, a large industrial city in eastern
Ukraine. Reportedly, protesters seized the regional
administration building. While a group of demonstrators were
storming the building from the central entrance, a crowd in Lenin
Square in front of it kept chanting “Russia!”

The participants of the rally were demanding to hold a referendum
on the future of the region, and particularly, on the status of
Russian language. Later in the day, Donetsk City Council held an extraordinary
session and approved an idea of holding a referendum on the
future fate of the Donetsk region. The council also supported the
initiative on setting up municipal militia squads to protect
citizens from possible aggression by radical nationalists,
reported Itar-Tass. Additionally, authorities decided to
introduce Russian as a second official language in the region.

The City Council refused to recognize the legitimacy of the
government in Kiev and declared itself the only legitimate body
in the city, according to ZN.UA. The decisions were read out to the crowd of demonstrators, who
praised the move.

Earlier, according to a local news portal, a scuffle occurred
between Party of Regions supporters and the so-called Volunteers’
Crops commanded by activist Pavel Gubarev, who was spontaneously
proclaimed “regional governor.” Addressing the crowd, Gubarev
said the authorities in Kiev were illegitimate and called for
establishing popular rule. He then urged demonstrators to set up
a peaceful protest camp in front of the regional government’s
office.

In Kharkov, the largest city in eastern Ukraine,
pro-Russian protesters managed to break through the cordon of
Maidan supporters and captured the government building. The
storming was accompanied by clashes and shooting, RBC daily
reported.

Some 111 people have been injured in clashes between anti- and
pro-Maidan demonstrators, reported Itar-Tass, citing the city’s
mayor, Gennady Kernes. At least 10 explosions were heard, both in the building and in
the area around it. At least one policeman was among those hurt
in the clashes, according to Itar-Tass.

One of the demonstrators got on to the roof of the administration
building, waving the Russian flag. Meanwhile, pro-Maidan
activists, who barricaded themselves inside one of the offices,
are hanging a white flag out of the window. Police were
accompanying injured supporters of the new government out of the
building to ambulances, Unian agency reports.

Activists from Right Sector radical group, who were inside the
building, “were throwing explosives, perhaps even grenades,
into public transport,” Kharkov Mayor Kernes told
journalists. “They also opened fire at protesters,” he
added and showed a cartridge for a Kalashnikov assault-rifle
which was found inside the building. According to the mayor,
“120 cocktail bombs, two mines and drugs” were
discovered at the site.

In the Crimean capital of Simferopol,
around 6,000 people marched, chanting “Russia!” and “No to
Fascism!” and carrying a huge Russian flag. Thousands were also demonstrating with Russian and Soviet flags
in Odessa, the third-largest city in the
country. According to police, around 5,000 people took part in
the gathering, while organizers insist there were up to 20,000.
Protests were also held in Lugansk, Melitopol, Yevpatoria, Kerch
and Mariupol.

Crimeans began protesting after the new self-proclaimed
government in Kiev introduced a law abolishing the use of other
languages for official documents in Ukraine. More than half the
Crimean population are Russian and use only this language for
their communication. The residents have announced they are going
to hold a referendum on March 30 to determine the fate of the
Ukrainian autonomous region.

Lidia Gany had some tea and bread, all she can afford these days for
most meals, put on her duffel coat with the fake purple fur collar, and
came down to the main square of this down-at-the-heels industrial city
at Ukraine's eastern edge to join fellow ethnic Russians in urging
Moscow to send troops across the border and protect them.

Since
Russian troops rolled into Crimea, and lawmakers there scheduled a
referendum for Sunday on whether to join Russia, the world's attention
has focused on the fate of the lush peninsula that juts into the Black
Sea. But here in Ukraine's coal-fired industrial east, where huge
numbers of Russians have lived for more than two centuries, a potent mix
of economic depression, ethnic solidarity and nostalgia for the
certainties of the Soviet past have many demanding the right to become
part of Russia as well.

"I'm for living in one country, with no
borders, like we used to. Like the fingers on one hand," said
60-year-old Lyudmila Zhuravlyova, who signed a petition asking for
Russian President Vladimir Putin's military invention to stop "political
persecution and physical annihilation of the Russian-speaking and
Orthodox population."

In Luhansk and other eastern Ukraine cities,
some men have formed militia groups such as "Luhansk Guard," the
"People's Auxiliary" as Russian news broadcasts swarm with alleged
atrocity stories about attacks on ethnic Russians and Jews in Ukraine —
helping to spur the secession drive and the anxieties that underlie it.
The Associated Press and other international media have found no
evidence of victimization.

On Sunday, in a possible portent of
more trouble to come, pro-Russian demonstrators overran the regional
government headquarters just off Soviet Street and forced Gov. Mikhail
Bolotskih to sign a resignation letter.

"Among them were young aggressive people in an intoxicated
condition, inappropriate condition, with bats, sticks, and it was
obvious they were armed with some other kinds of weapons," the governor,
who is appointed by Ukraine's central authorities, said Tuesday.

Bolotskih
said he put his signature to the letter only to protect the terrified
women, children and others who had taken refuge in the building out of
fear of pro-Russian mobs. After negotiations that dragged on through the
night, the occupiers left, and the governor was able to return to his
second-floor office. Three burly Ukrainian policeman stood guard by the
main staircase Tuesday.

Ukraine's
easternmost city was founded in the late 18th Century by Catherine the
Great as a foundry to make cannon and cannonballs for the Imperial
Russian Army. In Soviet times, it was home to one of the country's
blue-ribbon factories that turned out steam locomotives good enough to
be designated "IS"— for the Russian-language initials of dictator Josef
Stalin.

The city, with its
five-story Khrushchev-era apartment blocks and tidy downtown with a pair
of spire-topped edifices in a bombastic style known as Stalinist
Gothic, seems an architectural throwback to a time when coal miners and
locomotive factory workers were considered the proletarian elite.

But
the breakup of the Soviet Union and harsh economic realities of the
market haven't been kind to the east and the Luhansk region, where
nearly 70 percent of the population in a 2001 census reported Russian as
their mother tongue. Residents say many factories, including the
locomotive works, have had to drastically cut both payrolls and
production. Fewer smokestacks these days belch the sour-smelling coal
smoke that shows people still work there. It all means that many people
see Russia as the cure-all to their problems.

Some
in Luhansk, including
Gany, have relatives in Russia who tell them life is better on their
side of the border. She now must make ends meet on about $100 a month in
pension payments, she says_half of which goes to pay her rent. Her
husband is dead. She held a variety of jobs in the old Soviet Union,
from the BAM railway project in Siberia to a fish cannery in Kamchatka,
but much of her savings vanished when the former superpower broke up.
She now fears persecution from Ukraine's new leaders, and is afraid to
travel to other regions of the country.

In
2010, the year of Ukraine's last presidential election, Luhansk gave 89
percent of its votes to Viktor Yanukovych, a native of another town in
the Donbas coal-mining region. The pro-Moscow president fled office last
month after prolonged street protests and bloodshed in Kiev, and was
succeeded by a government made up of politicians friendlier to the
United States and European Union. For some in the east, the regime
change was not only blatantly unconstitutional, but a catastrophe.

"The
West wants to put Hitler's Plan Ost into effect," said Zoya Kozlova,
54, a teacher of philology. That plan, if fully implemented, would have
meant the enslavement, expulsion and extermination of most of the Slavic
peoples in Europe.

Pro-Moscow forces in Luhanks
already have a leader, self-styled "people's governor" Alexander
Kharitonov, who is spearheading the drive for a referendum. "The people
of Luhansk don't recognize illegitimate Kiev. We think that the
government has been changed through a coup d'etat," he said. And
Kharitonov said he hopes for assistance from Moscow to right that
situation.

"The Maidan (the
anti-Yanukovych protests in Kiev) showed us the police aren't able to
protect us. Neo-Nazi groups that were created on the Maidan have spread
throughout Ukraine. The police aren't able to protect us from them."

"The new government won't do it. So we think we have the right to ask our friend Russia to protect us," Kharitonov said.

Already,
the Kremlin has made clear that it's closely watching developments. On
Monday, in an official statement, the Russian Foreign Ministry said
lawlessness "now rules in eastern regions of Ukraine" and blamed the
Right Sector, a grouping of far-right and nationalist factions whose
activists were among the most radical and confrontational during three
months of protests that led to Yanukovych's ouster.

"Without
Putin's help, they will annihilate us," said Sergei Chupeyev, 69, a
retired mining engineer from Luhansk. "We need to ask him for help, or
tomorrow there will be fascists here."

Russian President Vladimir Putin has requested the use of Russian
military forces in Ukraine to settle the situation there. The Russian
population and the Crimea-based Black Sea Fleet are threatened by the
situation in the country, he said. Putin’s request was filed after the Chairman of the Federation
Council, Valentina Matvienko, said that in order to “protect
the people” Russia could theoretically send troops to
Ukraine. She particularly referred to the crisis in the
Autonomous Republic of Crimea, where Russians make the majority
of the population.

“It’s possible in this situation, complying with a request by
the Crimean government, even to bring a limited contingent of our
troops to ensure the safety of the Black Sea Fleet and the
Russian citizens living on Crimean territory. The decision is for
the president, the chief military commander, to make, of course.
But today, taking the situation into account, even that variant
can’t be excluded. We need to protect the people,” Matvienko
said.

“In connection with the extraordinary situation in Ukraine, the
threat to the lives of citizens of the Russian Federation, our
compatriots, and the personnel of the armed forces of the
Russian Federation on Ukrainian territory (in the Autonomous
Republic of Crimea)... I submit a proposal on using the armed
forces of the Russian Federation on the territory of Ukraine
until the normalization of the socio-political situation in the
that country.”

The Russian government has so far been careful in its assessment
of the new self-proclaimed Ukrainian government in Kiev.
Matvienko said the reason for that was Russia counting on its
Western partners, who vowed to guarantee the February 21
agreements between ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich
and the opposition.

“Russia did not interfere in the situation in Ukraine for a
very long time and showed restraint, assuming that the Western
states, which became backers of the agreements, would see that
strict compliance with the deal is observed,” she said.

However, after “violent upheaval” took place in Ukraine,
the Western states did not come up with “any reasonable
measures or responses,” Matvienko said. Russia, in contrast, for a very long time has urged the situation
to be resolved by lawful means, and called for the anti-coup
sentiments in Crimea and in eastern Ukraine to be heard, she
said.

“Not seeing an adequate reaction from the West, we could no
longer maintain status quo,” the speaker concluded.

Matvienko spoke as thousands of pro-Russian demonstrators rallied
in the Crimean cities of Simferopol, Melitopol, Yevpatoria and
Mariupol, protesting against the rule of new Kiev authorities. The Russian leader held detailed phone discussions on
“various aspects of the extraordinary situation in
Ukraine" with US President Barack Obama, the Kremlin press
service reported.

Putin stressed that in the case of further spread of violence in
the eastern regions of Ukraine and Crimea, Russia reserves the
right to protect their interests and the Russian speaking
population. Putin emphasised the existence of real threats to the life and
health of Russian citizens on Ukrainian territory.

In a separate conversation with French President Francois
Hollande, Putin said that there is a real threat to the lives of
citizens of the Russian Federation in Ukraine, Itar-tass reports. The
Russian commander in chief also held a telephone conversation
with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to discuss the case of an
escalation of violence against the Russian-speaking population in
the eastern regions of Ukraine and Crimea, the Kremlin announced.

Putin stressed that Russia cannot remain on the sidelines and
will apply the necessary measures within the framework of
international law to prevent further escalation of the crisis in
Ukraine. According to the Russian Constitution, the use of Army on foreign
territories can only be approved by the majority of the
Federation Council members upon a request by the President.

The developments follow an appeal by the Prime Minister of the
Autonomous Republic of Crimea, Sergey Aksyonov, who requested
that Russia to help cope with the crisis and ensure “peace
and calm” in the region. The tension in Crimea escalated following an attempt to seize the
building of the local Interior Ministry by gunmen overnight.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry condemned the move in a statement,
blaming the new authorities in Kiev for intending to
“destabilize the situation on the peninsula.”

Meanwhile, self-proclaimed Ukrainian Acting President Aleksandr
Turchinov has signed a decree ruling that appointment of the
pro-Russia premier in Crimea is “illegal.”

Aksyonov, who is the leader of Crimea’s Russian Unity party, was
appointed as the new Prime Minister of the autonomy after the
Crimean Supreme Council dismissed the regional government. Peace
and order in the region has been maintained by local armed
self-defense squads, which were widely misreported as Russian
troops on Friday.

Massive media speculation also arose around claims that the
Russian military have been making “illegal” moves in
Crimea. The Russian Foreign Ministry sent an official note to
Ukraine, stressing that all the moves are carried out “in
full accordance with basic Russian-Ukrainian agreements on the
Black Sea Fleet.”

It’s
a narrative that’s growing in popularity in the West: Vladimir Putin as
a 21st-century Adolf Hitler, an unhinged dictator bent on collecting
lost Russian lands.

It was
floated first on CNN last week, where former Georgian president Mikhail
Saakashvili – who fought and lost a war with Russia six years ago over a
place called South Ossetia – compared Mr. Putin’s stealth takeover of
the Crimean Peninsula to the Nazi annexation of Sudetenland in 1938. The
Canadian government has since embraced the storyline, with Foreign
Affairs Minister John Baird using the Sudetenland comparison while
denouncing Russian military moves in the Ukraine.

Prime
Minister Stephen Harper has made similar remarks, and former U.S.
secretary of state Hillary Clinton told a fundraiser in California: “If
this sounds familiar, it’s what Hitler did back in the ’30s.”

We
are, worryingly, in a situation where such comparisons can’t
immediately be laughed off. Mr. Putin’s own press conference this week
was characterized by two things: his alarming insistence that Russia had
a right to use its military to protect ethnic Russians living in other
post-Soviet countries, and his bitterness at the West for ignoring him
until he was pushed into a corner.

The
immediate triggers for Mr. Putin’s fury are now plain. The Kremlin
feels (and has evidence) that the West put its shoulder behind the
Ukrainian opposition that toppled the government of Viktor Yanukovych
last month following a deadly week of street battles between protesters
and police.

Mr. Yanukovych
was pro-Russian and clearly corrupt. But he was also the elected
president of Ukraine, with 12 months to go in his five-year term. His
overthrow was inspiring to watch, but it was also unconstitutional. (For
the record, the Kremlin says it’s the West that is encouraging fascism
by siding with the revolutionaries in Kiev who include right-wing
ultranationalists in their ranks.)

That
precedent set, Mr. Putin now seems willing to go as far as he needs to
in order to regain Russia’s lost influence in Ukraine – in the entire
country, if he can, or any pro-Russian part he can snap off. But this
New Cold War didn’t start last month. Nor was it doomed to happen this
way.

When
Mr. Putin came to power 15 years ago, he did so as a candidate who
appealed to many sectors of Russian society. His KGB background
suggested to those nostalgic for the Soviet days that Mr. Putin was the
tough leader Russia needed after the chaos of Russia’s 1990s. But his
track record as an aide to Anatoliy Sobchak, the reformist governor of
St. Petersburg, also persuaded Russia’s pro-Western liberals that he was
a man who shared their mindset, too.

Mr.
Putin’s first four years as president were marked by an battle inside
the Kremlin, pitting a camp of ministers and aides known as the siloviki,
the men of power, who had KGB backgrounds like Mr. Putin’s, against the
reformers, men like Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov and Alexander
Voloshin, the powerful chief of staff Mr. Putin inherited from Boris
Yeltsin. Mr. Putin was seen as listening to both sides, favouring
neither. This was the man who was the first foreign leader to call
former U.S. president George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks,
the man who shared intelligence with and opened his airspace for the
subsequent NATO invasion of Afghanistan.

But the siloviki
gained strength, and the reformers faded, as Mr. Putin saw that favour
go unreturned. He furiously railed against the U.S. attack on Iraq in
2003, but was ignored. Then came the 2003 Rose Revolution in the former
Soviet republic of Georgia – which saw the U.S.-educated Mr. Saakashvili
brought to power – and the Orange Revolution in Ukraine a year later.

The
Georgian and Ukrainian revolts had many things in common, among them
the fall of autocrats who ran semi-independent governments that deferred
to Moscow when the chips were down. Both uprisings were also spurred by
organizations that received funding from the U.S. National Endowment
for Democracy. As in the Middle East, “promoting democracy” in Eastern
Europe became a code word for supporting pro-Western politicians.

The
Western-backed revolts came alongside several tranches of eastward
expansion by NATO, an alliance that Moscow sees as retaining its Cold
War intent, as well as the establishment of an anti-ballistic missile
shield in Europe that Russia saw as upsetting the strategic balance by
eliminating its treasured nuclear deterrent.

Mr. Putin became convinced that the siloviki
were right, that the West was intent on keeping Russia weak, as it had
been under Mr. Yeltsin. By the beginning of his second term as President
in 2004, Mr. Kasyanov and Mr. Voloshin were gone from the Kremlin. Only
the KGB remained.

Barack
Obama saw the damage done, and came to office in 2008 promising a
“reset” in relations between Washington and Moscow. The timing was
right, with Mr. Putin stepping down the same year to the theoretically
junior post of prime minister in favour of one of his few remaining
liberal aides, Dmitry Medvedev.

The
two new presidents got along well, and Mr. Medvedev even gave Russian
acquiescence (in the form of an abstention at the United Nations
Security Council) to the establishment of a NATO no-fly zone over Libya
in 2011. But Mr. Putin – still the most powerful man in Russia – was
furious to see Russia’s goodwill again misused and the no-fly zone
expanded to include airstrikes that helped rebels topple and kill
Moammar Gadhafi, a long-time Kremlin ally.

Six months later, Mr. Medvedev awkwardly declared he would step aside so that Mr. Putin could return to the presidency.

“We
are often told our actions are illegitimate, but when I ask, ‘Do you
think everything you do is legitimate?’ they say ‘yes.’ Then, I have to
recall the actions of the United States in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya,
where they either acted without any UN sanctions or completely distorted
the content of such resolutions, as was the case with Libya,” Mr. Putin
fumed during a press conference Tuesday, his first remarks since the
Ukraine crisis erupted. “Our partners, especially in the United States,
always clearly formulate their own geopolitical and state interests and
follow them with persistence. Then, using the principle ‘You’re either
with us or against us’ they draw the whole world in. And those who do
not join in get beaten until they do.”

Even
while Washington was talking at home about a reset, the messages it
sent to Moscow were more confrontational. Mr. Obama’s first secretary of
state, Ms. Clinton, made headlines during her own 2008 bid for the
presidency by stating Mr. Putin, as a former KGB agent, “doesn’t have a
soul.” (Mr. Putin shot back that anyone seeking to be U.S. President “at
a minimum … should have a head.”)

Even
more controversial was Mr. Obama’s choice of academic Michael McFaul as
ambassador to Moscow in 2011. By his own description, Mr. McFaul, who
couldn’t be reached for an interview, was an expert on how popular
uprisings happen in authoritarian regimes. A decade earlier, he had
authored the provocatively titled book Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin.
One of his first acts after arriving in Moscow was inviting several key
members of the anti-Putin opposition to the U.S. embassy for a private
meeting.

The
opposition protests that swelled before and after that visit, and which
tarred Mr. Putin’s 2012 election win, were seen in the Kremlin as more
proof of Western meddling in and hostility to Russia. Mr. Putin accused
Ms. Clinton of personally giving “the signal” for his opponents to rise
up against him.

Since
returning to the Kremlin, Mr. Putin has made it clear he’s no longer
interested in co-operating with the West. He has backed Bashar al-Assad
to the hilt in the bloody struggle for Syria, another long-time Soviet
ally. Last month, he welcomed Egypt’s Abdul Fattah el-Sissi to Moscow,
and offered him military aid and an endorsement of his undeclared
presidential run, as Washington backed away from Cairo’s latest military
man in charge. A win for the West is a loss for Moscow. And vice-versa.

In
a September essay in The New York Times arguing against U.S.
intervention in Syria, Mr. Putin took on the idea of “American
exceptionalism,” and by extension U.S. world leadership. “It is
extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as
exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small
countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and
those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too,”
he wrote.

“You
have to understand the world in which Mr. Putin believes he lives. He’s
sure he’s in a power struggle, a geostrategic battle with the West,”
said Alexander Golts, a Moscow-based military analyst. “One of the
battlefields is Ukraine. In the beginning of December, he thought he’d
won, and then [Mr. Putin believes] the West organized these protests in
Kiev and stole his victory. Now he has to show his Western counterparts
that he’s not weak. He also has to show his inner circle that he’s not
weak.”

In
Ukraine, it’s Mr. Putin who is bending the rules and distorting the
facts in the same way he has accused the West of doing elsewhere. But
the battle for Ukraine is existential for him. Ukraine is central to
Russian history and culture, and crucial to Mr. Putin’s ambition of
restoring a sphere of influence over Moscow’s post-Soviet neighbours.
He’s almost certainly not going to back down, whatever the cost. There
“will be mutual damage,” Mr. Putin said when asked about the possibility
of Western sanctions over Crimea.

We
knew this, or at least we should have. But a lack of Western
scholarship on Russia – and the closure of many foreign media offices
(including The Globe and Mail’s own Moscow bureau a few years ago) – has
contributed to a dangerous lack of understanding of Russia in the West.

China,
by contrast, has in the past 15 years been deemed far more worthy of
study and journalism than Russia. Lobby groups such as the Canada-China
Business Council badgered Mr. Harper relentlessly when he didn’t visit
Beijing during the first two years he was in office. No one seems
bothered that Mr. Harper – eight years into his prime ministership – is
the only G-8 leader who has never made an official, bilateral trip to
Moscow.

“In
North America, the thinking was that European affairs are European
affairs,” said Andrew Robinson, a former Canadian ambassador to Ukraine.
“We don’t have a relationship with Russia right now.”

Which,
we can see now, has its costs. Every Western leader understands that
opening an embassy in Taiwan would bring a furious response from
Beijing. But no one in Washington, Brussels or Ottawa seems to have
expected what Moscow might do if the West encouraged the overthrow of a
pro-Russian leader in Ukraine.

When
Mr. Baird was in Kiev last week to show his support for Ukraine’s
post-revolutionary leadership, I asked him when was the last time he had
met with Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. There was a pause of
nearly 10 seconds before Mr. Baird recalled that both he and Mr. Lavrov
had attended a Syria peace conference in Montreux, Switzerland in late
January. They’ve had no interaction at all, then, since the change of
power in Kiev, or the Russian moves in Crimea.

A
decade ago, The eXile, a now-defunct satirical magazine based in
Moscow, published a list of 101 ways that Mr. Putin’s Russia then
resembled Weimar Germany. It was meant to be humourous, but the issue in
fact made for extremely depressing reading. Anger at foreigners was
rising, the eXile noted, as was militarism.

Russia
then was a proud but wounded country, one suffering from collapse of
its empire. The fall of the USSR was Russia’s Treaty of Versailles. Mr.
Harper, Mr. Baird and Ms. Clinton say Mr. Putin’s Russia today reminds
them of Nazi Germany. Scary words to describe a scary situation. If only
they paid such attention to Russia in the decade before we got to here.

In some quarters
public awareness is catching up with Stephen Lendman, Michel
Chossudovsky, Rick Rozoff, myself and a few others in realizing the
grave danger in the crisis that Washington has created in Ukraine.

The puppet politicians who Washington intended to put in charge of
Ukraine have lost control to organized and armed neo-nazis, who are
attacking Jews, Russians, and intimidating Ukrainian politicians.

The government of Crimea, a Russian province that Khrushchev
transferred to the Ukraine Soviet Republic in the 1950s, has disavowed
the illegitimate government that illegally seized power in Kiev and
requested Russian protection. The Ukrainian military forces in Crimea
have gone over to Russia. The Russian government has announced that it
will also protect the former Russian provinces in eastern Ukraine as
well.

As
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn pointed out, it was folly for the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union to transfer historic provinces of Russia into
Ukraine. At the time it seemedto the Soviet leadership like a
good thing to do. Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union and had been
ruled by Russia since the 18th century. Adding Russian territory to
Ukraine served to water down the nazi elements in western Ukraine that
had fought for Hitler
during World War 2. Perhaps another factor in the enlargement of
Ukraine was the fact of Khrushchev’s Ukrainian heritage.

Regardless, it did not matter until the Soviet Union and then the
former Russian empire itself fell apart. Under Washington’s pressure,
Ukraine became a separate country retaining the Russian provinces, but
Russia retained its Black Sea naval base in Crimea.

Washington
tried, but failed, to take Ukraine in 2004 with the Washington-financed
“Orange Revolution.” According to Assistant Secretary of State
Victoria Nuland, since this failure Washington has “invested” $5
billion in Ukraine in order to foment agitation for EU membership for
Ukraine. EU membership would open Ukraine to looting by Western bankers
and corporations, but Washington’s main goal is to establish US missile
bases on Russia’s border with Ukraine and to deprive Russia of its
Black Sea naval base and military industries in eastern Ukraine. EU
membership for Ukraine means NATO membership.

Washington
wants missile bases in Ukraine in order to degrade Russia’s nuclear
deterrent, thus reducing Russia’s ability to resist US hegemony. Only
three countries stand in the way of Washington’s hegemony over the
world, Russia, China, and Iran.

Iran
is surrounded by US military bases and has US fleets off its coast.
The “Pivot to Asia” announced by the warmonger Obama regime is ringing
China with air and naval bases. Washington is surrounding Russia with
US missile and NATO bases. The corrupt Polish and Czech governments
were paid to accept US missile and radar bases, which makes the Polish
and Czech puppet states prime targets for nuclear annihilation.

Washington
has purchased the former Russian and Soviet province of Georgia,
birthplace of Joseph Stalin, and is in the process of putting this
puppet into NATO. Washington’s Western
European puppets are too greedy for Washington’s money to take
cognizance of the fact that these highly provocative moves are a direct
strategic threat to Russia. The attitude of European governments seems
to be, “after me, the deluge.”

Russia
has been slow to react to the many years of Washington’s provocations,
hoping for some sign of good sense and good will to emerge in the West.
Instead, Russia has experienced rising demonization from Washington and
European capitals and foaming at the mouth vicious denunciations by the
West’s media whores. The bulk of the American and European populations
are being brainwashed to see the problem that Washington’s meddling has
caused in Ukraine to be Russia’s fault. Yesterday, I heard on National
Public Radio a presstitute from the New Republic describe Putin as the
problem.

The
ignorance, absence of integrity, and lack of independence of the US
media greatly enhances the prospect for war. The picture being drawn for
insouciant Americans is totally false. An informed people would have
burst out laughing when US Secretary of State John Kerry denounced
Russia for “invading Ukraine” in “violation of international law.”
Kerry is the foreign minister of a country that has illegally invaded
Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, organized the overthrow of the government in
Libya, tried to
overthrow the government in Syria, attacks the civilian populations of
Pakistan and Yemen with drones and missiles, constantly threatens Iran
with attack, unleashed the US and Israeli trained Georgian army on the
Russian population of South Ossetia, and now threatens Russia with
sanctions for standing up for Russians and Russian strategic interests.
The Russian government noted that Kerry has raised hypocrisy to a new
level.

Kerry has no answer to the
question: “Since when does the United States government genuinely
subscribe and defend the concept of sovereignty and territorial
integrity?"

Kerry,
as is always the case, is lying through his teeth. Russia hasn’t
invaded Ukraine. Russia sent a few more troops to join those at its
Black Sea base in view of the violent anti-Russian statements and
actions emanating from Kiev. As the Ukrainian military in Crimea
defected to Russia, the additional Russian troops were hardly
necessary. The stupid Kerry, wallowing in his arrogance, hubris, and evil,
issued direct threats to Russia. The Russian foreign minister dismissed
Kerry’s threats as “unacceptable.”

The stage is set for war.

Note
the absurdity of the situation. Kiev has been taken over by
ultra-nationalist neo-nazis. A band of ultra-nationalist thugs is the
last thing the European Union wants or needs as a member state. The EU
is centralizing power and suppressing the sovereignty of the member
states. Note the alignment of the neoconservative Obama regime with
anti-semitic neo-nazis. The neoconservative clique that has dominated
the US government since the Clinton regime is heavily Jewish, many of
whom are dual Israeli/US citizens. The Jewish neoconservatives,
Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and National Security
Adviser Susan Rice, have lost control of their coup to neo-Nazis who
preach “death to the Jews.”

The
Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on February 24 that Ukrainian Rabbi
Moshe Reuven Azman advised “Kiev’s Jews to leave the city and even the
country.” Edward Dolinsky, head of an umbrella organization of
Ukrainian Jews, described the situation for Ukrainian Jews as “dire” and
requested Israel’s help.

This
is the situation that Washington created and defends, while accusing
Russia of stifling Ukrainian democracy. An elected democracy is what
Ukraine had before Washington overthrew it. At this time there is no legitimate Ukrainian government.

Everyone
needs to understand that Washington is lying about Ukraine just as
Washington lied about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq, just as Washington lied about Iranian nukes, just as Washington
lied about Syrian president Assad using chemical weapons, just as
Washington lied about Afghanistan, Libya, NSA spying, torture. What
hasn’t Washington lied about? Washington is comprised of three elements:
Arrogance, Hubris, and Evil. There is nothing else there.

All the self-righteous huffing and puffing in Washington over Ukraine
jars on European and especially Russian ears after the multiple
U.S.-led invasions and interventions in other people's countries of
recent years. It's difficult to say what is more astonishing: the double
standards exhibited by the White House, or the apparent total lack of
self-awareness of U.S. officials.

Secretary of State John Kerry risked utter ridicule when he declared
it unacceptable to invade another country on a "completely trumped-up
pretext," or just because you don't like its current leadership. Iraq in
2003 springs instantly to mind. This is exactly what George W. Bush and
Tony Blair did when they "trumped up" the supposed threat posed by the
hated Saddam Hussein's fabled weapons of mass destruction.

Like Saddam, the Taliban leadership in place in Afghanistan in 2001
was deeply objectionable. But instead of just going after Osama bin
Laden and his al Qaeda training camps after the 9/11 attacks, Bush
(again abetted by Blair) opted for full-scale regime change. The
lamentable consequences of that decision are still being felt 13 years
later, not least by Afghan civilians who have been dying in ever greater
numbers as the final Nato withdrawal approaches.

U.S. President Barack Obama, a former law professor who should know
better, has charged Vladimir Putin, his Russian counterpart, with
violating Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity, in breach of
international law.

But it is Obama, following in Bush's footsteps, who has repeatedly
and cynically flouted international law by launching or backing myriad
armed attacks on foreign soil, in Libya, Somalia, Yemen and Pakistan to
name a few, without U.N. security council authorization. It is Obama's
administration which continues to undermine international law by
refusing to join or recognize the International Criminal Court, the most
important instrument of international justice to have been developed
since 1945.

And it is Obama's State Department, principally in the person of
Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, that fatally overplayed
its hand in the run-up to last month's second Ukraine revolution.
Nuland's infamous "f**k the EU" comment revealed the extent to which
Washington was recklessly maneuvering to undermine Ukraine's elected
pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, by backing the Kiev street
protesters' demands.

The EU had wanted to take things more gradually, for fear of
provoking the very Russian reaction to which the U.S. now so strongly
objects. When the foreign ministers of Germany, France and Poland,
acting for the EU, negotiated a compromise agreement on February 22 that
envisaged early elections, the crisis appeared to have been defused.
Russia did not like the deal, but seemed ready to go along.

But within 24 hours, the opposition had torn up the agreement. It
forced Yanukovych from power and sacked the government. To alarm in
Moscow, where nightmarish World War II memories linger, Ukrainian
neo-fascists were among those who seized control. They are now part of
the new government in Kiev.

The U.S. almost immediately gave its blessing to what the Kremlin
later described as a "coup d'etat" while the EU, knowing this was what
Washington wanted, just looked on. Little wonder the Russians were
furious at what they saw as a western double cross.

Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister, reflected these worries
when he voiced "most serious concern" over Ukraine in phone calls to the
French, German and Polish foreign ministers. "The opposition not only
has failed to fulfil a single one of its obligations but is already
presenting new demands all the time, following the lead of armed
extremists and pogromists whose actions pose a direct threat to
Ukraine's sovereignty and constitutional order,'' Lavrov said. But it
was already too late.

Obama and Kerry seem to have calmed down a little since the crisis
first broke. The self-righteous hyperbole about international rights is
less evident, though it has not disappeared entirely. Obama has heard
the many voices in the U.S. and beyond terming this the worst east-west
crisis since the end of the Cold War -- and as the biggest foreign test
of his presidency.

So now he's doing what he does best: talking. In his latest phone
call to Putin, on Thursday this week, Obama put forward a plan to
resolve the stand-off diplomatically. It includes direct talks between
Moscow and Kiev, the return of Russian troops to their bases, and the
deployment of international observers to ensure the rights of all ethnic
groups, including Crimean Russians, are respected. But don't hold your breath. Putin is in no hurry to back off or back down.

He has his tail up after a fortnight in which he exposed the
hypocrisy and hollowness of much of western policy and politicians. His
behavior, especially in Crimea, has been dangerous, wrong-headed and
irresponsible in the extreme. In many ways, Putin is an unredeemed Cold
War throwback. He is definitely not the sort of chap one would invite
round for dinner, as a former British diplomat commented. The crisis
could still explode in his and everyone else's face. But it was not
unprovoked.

And the Russian leader has an eye for precedent. Similar battles over
so-called "frozen conflicts" and the rights of isolated ethnic groups
loom elsewhere on Russia's periphery, in Georgia, Moldova, Armenia,
Nagorno-Karabakh, and maybe Belarus and the Baltic states too. Putin is
putting down a marker, even as he plays Obama and Kerry for fools.

Whatever they think in Washington, and whatever the financial markets
say, it's working for him personally. Latest opinion polls in Russia
show Putin's popularity soaring. One of these days western leaders will
drop the pious cant, learn to stop under-estimating him, and recognize
Russia's leader-for-life as the canny, very dangerous, utterly
unscrupulous opponent he is.

Over three quarters of the Russian public approve of President
Putin’s work, according to the mid-March public opinion poll. Most
respondents connected with a good handling of the Ukrainian political
crisis and the help extended to the people of Crimea. According to the VCIOM All-Russian Public Opinion Research
Center, since the beginning of 2014 Vladimir Putin’s rating has
risen 15 percent and stands at 75.7 percent – the highest in the
last five years.

The pollsters say this is caused first of all by the complicated
political situation in Ukraine and the Autonomous Republic of
Crimea that was preparing to hold a referendum on joining Russia.
63 percent of respondents mentioned this as a primary reason of
their support of the presidential course.Another large group - 32
percent - mentioned the victory of the Russian team at the Sochi
Paralympics. Putin’s rating in major cities was slightly lower at 71.3 percent
but also reached a five-year peak.

The previous peak in Vladimir Putin’s popularity was in May 2012.
68.8 percent of Russians voiced their support for the president
around the date of his inauguration. A different poll conducted by VCIOM on March 14 and 15 showed
that 91.4 percent of Russian citizens approve of Crimea becoming
a part of the Russian Federation. Only 5 percent said they were
against such an outcome. 86 percent of respondents claimed they
already consider Crimea - home to an ethnic Russian majority - a
part of Russia.

Crimea was caught in the turmoil that engulfed Ukraine after
opposition leaders supported by rightist extremists ousted
President Viktor Yanukovich in late February this year. On March
16 the republic held a referendum on joining Russia in which over
96 percent of voters supported such a move.

Vladimir Putin addressed the Federal Assembly on March 18
pledging full support to Crimeans and praising their decision to
return to Russia after about 60 years of separation. On the same
day the Russian President and Crimean leaders signed a treaty
that makes the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of
Sevastopol new parts of the Russian Federation.

After the ceremony Putin asked Russian parliamentarians to ratify
the treaty as fast as possible. The Lower House will hold a vote on ratification on Thursday and
the Upper House is scheduled to vote on Friday.

The recent events in Ukraine provide a text-book case study on how to
snatch (political and diplomatic) defeat from the jaws of victory.

The history of Ukraine is not the subject of this article, as
information on these historical issues can be obtained easily from a
Google search. As such, the basic point is that Ukraine is not a
homogenous country. Very roughly-speaking, its population is primarily
ethnically Ukrainian and Catholic in the West, and primarily ethnically
Russian and Orthodox in the East. Crimea - which only became part of
Ukraine less than 60 years ago (prior to that it was a part of Russia) -
is a semi-autonomous region within Ukraine, where the population is
approximately 60% ethnically Russian.

For historical reasons, there is a degree of antipathy between ethnic
Ukrainians and ethnic Russians in Ukraine; and there is a degree of
resentment among ethnic Ukrainians about the amount of influence that
Russia has historically exerted over Ukraine. Conversely, ethnic
Russians in Ukraine look to Russia for security and want close Russian
involvement.

Ukraine's economy is not stable or robust. It is approximately US$
150 Billion in debt - US$ 15 Billion of which is owed to Western
financial institutions, and if it defaults on the debt, it will cause a
crisis in Western financial circles. Russia had previously offered
Ukraine a financial guarantee to cover the US$ 15 Billion of debt to
Western institutions. These debts aside, Ukraine gets all of its gas
supplies (without which perhaps a third of its population may die in
winter, and its fragile economy will implode) from Russia at subsidised
rates, and it is further subsidised by Russia with various other
commodities (including food and substantial debt-forgiveness). Ukraine's
30% discount on the natural gas that it buys from Russia every year is
in fact the rent Russia pays for the use of the Crimea for its Black Sea
Fleet, but Ukraine nevertheless also defaults on payments of
approximately US$ 2.5 Billion of natural gas from Russia every year.
These, by the way, are the very stark realities of what is - which trump sentimentalities and views of what should be in an ideal world.

It is commonly accepted that Ukraine's recently-deposed President
(who is still, according to international law, the President), was
corrupt - as was his administration - and not necessarily fit to hold
that office. It is also commonly accepted that his sentiments were
predominantly pro-Russian, and that neither he nor his administration
were widely accepted by ethnic Ukrainians; but were widely accepted by
ethnically-Russian Ukrainians. It is also commonly accepted that he was
democratically elected.

During recent civic unrest in Ukraine - sparked by the
President's/ex-President's refusal to ratify a treaty with the European
Union, which unrest ultimately resulted in loss of life - primarily
ethnic Ukrainians (the "opposition") succeeded in bringing about his
agreement to reduce his powers, implement a national unity government
with the opposition, and hold early elections at the end of the year.

This represented an unqualified victory for the opposition, as
holding course on these terms would almost certainly have brought about
that which they desired (being closer ties to the European Union)
without further conflict, without endangering their financial guarantees
from Russia, and most importantly, in a stable manner. And then it all went very, and very avoidably, wrong.

After these terms had been agreed to, and in a rapid turn of events,
elements among the opposition suddenly declared that they did not accept
the agreement, and would storm the Presidential Palace the next morning
if the President did not immediately step down. Consequently, he fled
to Russia. Within the space of 72 hours, a new (unelected) government
was sworn in, which declared him a fugitive.

Thereafter, in short order, the new government in Kiev's first law
immediately revoked foreign language (read Russian) rights in Ukraine
(this would be like immediately banning the use of French in Canada or
Flemish in Belgium). Other than this, the newly appointed Head of the
Ukrainian government's Security and National Defense Committee (a
virulently and publicly anti-Russian person) publicly called on the
Chechen separatist leader (who is on the USA's list as the regional
leader of Al-Qaeda) to act with Ukraine and attack Russia.

Naturally none of these acts made Ukrainian citizens who are
ethnically Russian feel particularly secure. The EU's Foreign Minister
then publicly hugged members of the new government on TV, and the USA's
representative to the region had publicly gone to give cookies to the
opposition who were now in the new government - also on TV. The ethnic
Russian Ukrainian citizens therefore looked to Russia for help; which
they got (Russia basing its acts on a very loose interpretation of an
agreement which allows it to see to the security of its Black Sea Fleet
in Crimea).

To step away from Ukraine, a comparative situation would be for a
pro-Mexican President in the USA to be deposed by force, for the new
unelected government to immediately ban the use of Spanish (read
Mexican) language rights in the USA, to appoint a virulently and
publicly anti-Mexican person as the Head of Homeland Security,
and for him to call on Al-Qaeda to attack Mexico. It would not make
Mexican-Americans (or Mexico) feel particularly secure or satisfied. It
is also unlikely that Mexican-Americans or Mexico would be further
reassured if the EU's Foreign Minister then came and publicly hugged
members of that new American government on TV, or the Russian
representative to America went to publicly give them cookies on TV (as
the USA's representative did in Kiev). This comparison is inverted
in respect of Ukraine/Russia in that in this example the USA is the
dominant country - however it serves its purpose to illustrate the
potential effect that crude diplomatic actions can have in exacerbating
the fears of a (sizeable) minority in any country.

In any event, after these precipitous and unnecessary actions,
Russian troops entered the Crimea. These events have now created an
international geopolitical flashpoint, in which postures reminiscent of
the Cold War are being struck, with certain Western governments and the
Russian government being at loggerheads, and inflammatory rhetoric being
stepped up on an almost daily basis.

In this stand-off, Western political figures and the Western media
are painting Russia in general and President Vladimir Putin in
particular as the aggressor against Ukraine and as invading Crimea -
which is according to them an indication of a Russian attempt to expand
its "empire". Conversely, Russian and CIS political figures and media
are painting the West as being hypocritical for supporting what they
term an "illegal" government in Ukraine, and Russia's posture is that it
is merely protecting Russian civilians in Crimea according to a
bilateral agreement with Ukraine.

Other than it being worth noting that no military fighting or
bloodshed has occurred in Crimea - yet, it should also be remembered
that the ethnic Russians that make up 60% of the population of Crimea
(and form the majority of the democratically-elected Crimean Parliament
that has now voted to secede from Ukraine as a result of these
incidents) are also Ukrainians by citizenship.

As such, various diplomats' and political leaders' statements that
Ukrainians must be allowed to make their own decisions without external
interference should also apply to them - unless race-based politics are
to be invoked. This is why it is always best for diplomats and
politicians to think carefully about the potential unintended
consequences of their statements before making them in public.

In the current situation, neither the Russian/ethnic-Russian
Ukrainians' position nor the Western/ethnic-Ukrainian Ukrainians'
positions is either completely correct or completely incorrect. There
are elements of truth in both sides' arguments, and also elements of
falsity or posturing. In general, it is now very messy. This situation
was precipitated primarily by hasty and unthinking actions and
statements from (politically) unsophisticated and inexperienced people,
who assumed positions of authority. However, and more seriously, the
continuation and escalation of this incident primarily represents the
complete failure of experienced politicians and diplomats - who should
know better - to manage this process professionally and diplomatically,
and to seek resolution instead of promoting tension.

Regrettably, so poor has this diplomatic performance been that in
conversations which I have held over the past week with friends and
former colleagues of mine in both Ukraine and Russia - who have been in
government service in both of those countries - we have all agreed that
had this type of impulsive behaviour been exhibited by diplomats and
political leaders during the Cold War, we would have come close to
nuclear war erupting.

A further cautionary note is that it serves no purpose to demonise
President Putin as an individual. He is an elected President of a
government. Many ministers in his government (and Parliament) favour, in
comparison to him, a much harder line. He currently enjoys a 68%
approval rating within Russia for his actions in Ukraine, but if he had
taken a harder line, his approval rating in Russia would have been even
higher.

This article is, by the way, not a defence of either the Russian or
Western positions. The current situation is one of the occasions where
it can be said that there are no "clean" sides or arguments, and fault
can be found on all sides. This article is, however, a criticism of the
failures and ineptitude in geopolitical stewardship by diplomats and
political leaders, who have failed to exercise even the most basic and
(supposedly) unbreakable rules of geopolitical statecraft, which are:

1. Never say anything in public that will stoke passions unless you
want to start a conflict (verbal, diplomatic, trade, economic or
military), and even then, only do so if you are certain that you will
win any such conflict to come.

2. Never say anything in public that will stoke the (negative)
passions of the population of a potentially opposing country, as you
will then limit the options that the Head of State of that country has,
as he or she cannot oppose the will (passions) of their own people once
they are inflamed.

3. Never allow a situation to continue to escalate without trying
your utmost to defuse passions as soon as possible, as the longer a
standoff continues the more likely it becomes that the Laws of
Unintended Consequences will be invoked, over which you will have
absolutely no control.

The
inflammatory statements of many political leaders and diplomats -
whose job is in fact to ensure global stability not promote global
instability - sound in some cases like the histrionic comments to be
found in mock debates between first-year political science students;
rather than reflecting sophisticated and mature diplomatic stewardship,
focussed towards responsible de-escalation of tensions at a geopolitical
flashpoint. Other than this, let us examine a few geopolitical,
economic and military realities related to the current situation:

The world is united against Russia:

Well, actually, it is not. The combined population of Russia and the
CIS countries which support the Russian / ethnic-Russian Ukrainians'
position - and the qualified support of China for Russia - means that
the number of persons supporting the Russian position is exponentially
larger than the combined population of the USA and Western Europe. As
such, there is, in fact, a majority of support for Russia if one wants
to crudely try to use numbers as a benchmark for legitimacy. Moreover,
in most of Asia (excluding China), Latin America, and Africa, the
majority of people - including those who even know where to find Ukraine
on a map - generally couldn't care less either way (except as to how it
will affect their economies), as they have their own regional issues to
attend to.

The United Nations Option:

Seeing as the Russian Federation is a permanent Member of the UN
Security Council, and has a veto on the Council, it is a statistical
possibility of zero that any effective action could or would be achieved
through the United Nations.

The Sanctions Option:

Western Europe gets approximately 50% of its natural gas supplies
(absolutely essential for heating in winter and for industry) from the
Russia. Russia has alternative markets, and can turn off the supply
without shattering its own economy. Western Europe does not have an
alternative supply (the infrastructure for receipt and distribution of
sufficient natural gas from other locations does not exist). The results
of the closing off of the gas supply to Western Europe would be
extraordinarily serious for Western Europe and the EU's economy, and in
comparison not nearly as serious for Russia.

Other than this, the US$ 120 Billion per annum worth of trade between
Russia and Western Europe benefits primarily Western Europe - not
Russia. Russia is self-sufficient in food production, and is a net
exporter -for which it is paid in foreign currency. As such, pressure on
the Russian Rouble will, in fact, benefit Russia, as in Rouble terms
the exports will be more valuable for Russia, being paid for in foreign
currency as they are.

Moreover, other than having some of the largest deposits of oil,
diamonds, and multiple minerals and metals, Russia also has some of the
largest deposits of Strategic Minerals - which the rest of the world
cannot do without. As such, continuation of Russian exports is assured,
and if the West did not buy these product (many of which they have to)
then China will buy them.

Finally, Russia has the fourth largest foreign currency reserves in
the world, has hardly any debt, and its economy is sound. Western
European countries and the USA on the other hand have highly indebted
economies - some of which are teetering towards bankruptcy, and others
of which are in the grips of severe austerity measures. No points for guessing who will lose the most with sanctions.

The Military Option:

Various intemperate analysts and political advisers have been
stridently advocating that American and/or NATO military assistance be
provided to Ukraine. Well, let us see. In Strategic Warfare terms, the
Russian Federation has 2 500 Strategic Nuclear Missiles and over 6 000
Tactical Nuclear Weapons - more than the combined nuclear arsenal of the
USA and every other NATO country combined. In Conventional Warfare
terms, Russia has an army of 770 000 men with a further 2 500 000
reserves, 15 000 tanks, 28 000 Armoured Fighting vehicles, 8 000
artillery pieces and mobile rocket launchers, a 21st century
air-defence system, 3 000 aircraft and 900 helicopters - again, more
than the armies of the USA and all NATO members combined. The Russian
Armed Forces' home country (and abundant logistical resupply) is also
right next to Ukraine, while Crimea is home to the entire (large) Black
Sea Fleet of the Russian navy. Therefore, unless the Japanese code of
Bushido - which advocates Hara-Kiri (ritual suicide) and/or Kamikaze
activities - has recently become the ideology of Western leaders; it is
safe to assume it most unlikely that any military assistance could or
would be provided to Ukraine by any Western Armed forces.

The Diplomatic Option:

This is, frankly, the only option available. However, given the
extraordinarily impulsive and belligerent way that it has been handled
to date (in public, instead of in private), one hopes that the political
leaders and diplomats that have been breaking the most basic rules of
statecraft by making inflammatory public statements will rather (as they
seem not to know the basics of their own profession) buy and read a
copy of Henry Kissinger's book "Diplomacy", and then start to act in a
manner that actually befits their high political or diplomatic office.
Currently, they are, in fact, behaving worse than speculators who
irresponsibly play with Other People's Money - as they are, through
engaging in irresponsible and inflammatory public rhetoric, actually
playing with Other People's Lives.

I remember that some years ago, when I was a guest of members of both
the Ukrainian Federal Government and the Government of the Autonomous
Region of the Crimea; I held discussions with them at a Crimean city on
the Black Sea coast called Yevpatoria - which had been, in Soviet times,
a holiday city. The government guest house that I was put up in had
formerly been the USSR's special government house where Yuri Gagarin and
other Soviet Cosmonauts were put up prior to their Space Missions, and
it was filled with Cosmonaut memorabilia. It also had a "Russian
Pyramid" billiard table with its outsized billiard balls. Over a few
games of billiards and some drinks after our discussions, we had time to
chat informally, and I was introduced to a number of Ukrainian
proverbs, two of which strike me as being apt for the current situation.

Given the inflammatory rhetoric being used by diplomats and political
leaders, the only possible result of such rhetoric can be to
continually stoke the fires of potential conflict instead of pouring oil
on troubled waters. Bearing in mind that it is the Ukrainians, and
no-one else, who will bear the brunt of any escalation of conflict, the
first relevant Ukrainian proverb would be this: "The obliging fool is worse than an enemy".
Perhaps it would be best for the Ukrainians themselves to take control
of their own fate and enter into direct (discreet) negotiations with
each other and with Russia and/or Western countries; and not to place
their fate in the hands of those who would oblige them with populist
words, but then disappoint them in respect of concrete actions if the
populist rhetoric escalated the situation.

One only has to look at the assurances given to Poland by third
parties in 1939 - and then review what happened to Poland between 1939
and 1945, but most especially after 1945, to see what can happen to a
country that places the control of its fate into the hands of third
party countries - instead of remaining in control of its own destiny.

The second Ukrainian proverb - given that the situation as it
currently stands in Ukraine is still infinitely soluble in comparison to
what it could most definitely still degenerate into if not checked
through skilful statecraft - is this: "Only when you have eaten a lemon do you appreciate what sugar is".

The taste of the lemon that could yet be eaten if this situation
deteriorates further would be very bitter for all parties involved, and
it would take decades, if not longer, to remove its bitter taste and
legacy if consumed. For all parties, it would be better at this time to rather go in search of sugar.

Stuart Sterze is an international businessman who previously provided
Strategic Geopolitical Consulting services to governments of Eastern
and Western European countries, governments of countries within the
Commonwealth of Independent States (former USSR) - including the Russian
Federation and Ukraine - and to Europe-based International
Organisations.

As the US and its European allies rally around the Ukrainian coup leaders and
denounce the Crimean referendum, we have yet another opportunity to stand in
awe of Washington’s limitless supply of arrogance. Meeting with the new "Prime
Minister" of Ukraine – who achieved his high office by unleashing mobs
on the duly elected government – President Barack Obama averred
Washington would be "forced to apply a cost" unless the Crimean vote
is called off.

So here is the United States, the alleged champion of "democracy,"
hailing a decidedly undemocratic coup, honoring one of the coup leaders
with an appearance at the White House, and railing against the decision
of the democratically elected Parliament of Crimea to let the people
vote on their own future.

As if vaguely aware of the massive hypocrisy infusing his word-cloud,
Obama conceded the Crimeans might possibly have some say in all this, just not now:
he wants talks with the Kremlin which "could lead to different
arrangements over time" for Crimea. "But, that’s not something that can
be done with the barrel of a gun pointed at you" – that is, unless we’re
talking about Afghanistan. Or Iraq.

In Iraq, the first post-invasion elections were unilaterally canceled by Paul
Bremmer, the American viceroy, because the newly "liberated" nation
"wasn’t
ready."

As conceived by the neocon geniuses who lied us into that war, the original scenario
for the elections was for a series of handpicked local "councils" to
vet the candidates and apportion parliamentary seats to suit the
convenience of Washington policymakers. This was furiously rejected by
the Ayatollah Sistani, supreme religious leader of the country’s
majority Shi’ites, who called out tens of thousands of his followers
into the streets, howling holy murder. This set Bremmer and his fellow
neocons back on their heels, and I guess the military intervened to get
Washington to override Bremmer’s commissars and let the Iraqis have
direct elections: you know, like one person one vote.

Then a referendum to ratify the Iraqi constitution was held, and shortly afterward the much-touted "blue finger" vote,
at which point over 100,000 US troops were fighting a revived Sunni
insurgency. The elections failed to tamp down support for the rebels and
so Bush ordered the "surge," which brought the total to over 150,000 American soldiers on the ground in Iraq.

Four elections have been held in Afghanistan with a very big American gun pointed at the Afghan people. In the ’04, ’05, ’09, and 2010
elections for President and Parliament there were as many as 101,000 US
troops in the country – that is, 101,000 guns pointed at the
electorate. Two of those elections have been held with Obama in the
White House – but we can’t really blame him for his hypocrisy.

After all, the habit of "exceptionalism"
is so ingrained in our political class, so much a part of the very air
they breathe, that they are no longer even aware of it. To ordinary
human beings, the breathtaking double standard is all too obvious, but
to an inhabitant of Washington’s Beltway such heretical thoughts are
downright subversive, indicative of the dreaded "moral equivalency" that
separates supposedly marginal figures like Noam Chomsky from the ranks
of the respectable.

When we do it, goes the unspoken first rule of "mainstream" American foreign policy, it’s an act of "liberation" – but when they do it, it’s a brazen violation of international law and a horrific act of aggression.

Our European sock puppets don’t dare dispute this, although their
subjects might have a far different opinion. Before Yatsenyuk showed up
in Washington with his hand out, the US and its NATO allies plus Japan
issued a "stern warning," as the McClatchy story put it, demanding the Russians cancel the referendum – and naturally not deigning to address the Crimeans directly:

"Any such referendum would have no legal effect. Given the lack of
adequate preparation and the intimidating presence of Russian troops,
it would also be a deeply flawed process which would have no moral
force. For all these reasons we would not recognize the outcome."

Yet all these American satraps recognize the "government" of Hamid
Karzai, kept in power by American force of arms, just as they recognized the
Iraqi government that finally emerged from the rubble of war. Or is it that
the presence of American troops is somehow less “intimidating” than the Russians?
Tweet me when Putin sets up the Crimean equivalent of Abu Ghraib. Or when those
mysterious Russian-troops-out-of-uniform go on a murderous rampage like these
guys did.

In Washington, Yatsenyuk at his side, Obama declared that he and his
international vassals would "completely reject" what he called a
"slapdash" election. Did Yatsenyuk wince just a bit upon hearing these
words? After all, is the May 25 national election scheduled in Ukraine
any less slapdash than the Crimean referendum? Not that elections mean
much in Kiev these days.

As Obama hailed the "courage" of the coupists – and Yatsenyuk posed
for the cameras while declaring in a Ukrainian-accented Churchillian
voice "We will never surrender!" – it all came down to the money. Hurry up and pass that $1 billion dollar "aid package" for Ukraine, Obama urged Congress.

He needn’t have bothered: legislation passed the House on Tuesday and the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee approved a similar bill the next day. One of the
few rational human beings on Capitol Hill, Sen. Rand Paul, wrote an op-ed saying
we should "get tough" on the Russians by … denying Ukraine that billion
dollar boondoggle, which I thought was a rather too clever by half way of putting
it. But that should tell you what the atmosphere is like in Beltway-land, where
your money is their chance to posture as world leaders and we’re always on the
verge of some stupendous "crisis."

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the overwhelming majority
of Americans oppose US intervention in Ukraine, and are against sending
military aid in any form: even support for sanctions is weak,
with younger voters decisively opposed. While the Washington
establishment is frothing at the mouth over Ukraine, a judicious
politician like Sen. Paul is wisely urging policymakers not to "tweak"
the Russians – a view more in line with what ordinary Americans think.

Preening and posing on the international stage, huffing and puffing
and threatening to blow Putin’s house down, the Americans are
overreacting to what should be
a regional issue of marginal importance. Yet there is an internal logic
to this overreaction, one dictated by economic and political factors,
the first of these being the ongoing project of NATO expansion.

When a country joins NATO, it must measure up to the alliance’s
military standards, which means a complete upgrade of the armed forces.
This is a bonanza
for Western arms companies, mostly American, which supply the required
equipment and reap multi-billions in profits every time a new member is
inducted into the club. The old Committee to Expand NATO was generously
funded by the big weapons manufacturers, who drooled at the prospect of
recruiting former Soviet bloc nations into the fold. There is money to
be made in Ukraine by the sort of crony capitalists who thrive in the
Age of Obama, and you can bet the push to confer NATO membership on Kiev
is bound to pick up steam. The Georgians, too, are in line
for amalgamation into the NATO Borg, which has moved so far eastward
since the end of the cold war that they’re almost at the gates of
Moscow.

When the Berlin Wall fell, and the old cold war order dissolved,
Western European leaders were eager to ensure peace and relative
stability. This is why Germany’s Helmut Kohl made a deal
with Mikhail Gorbachev that the price of German reunification would be
no eastward expansion of NATO. We can see what the status of that
"gentleman’s agreement" is today.

Western leaders only bloviate about moral and "international law"
when it suits their purposes. Otherwise, when that law is supposed to apply
to them, they shrug it off and suddenly it’s might makes right. Such a Janus-faced
view of justice on the part of the US government is all too familiar to the
world’s peoples: what’s new is that, at this point, even the American people
are beginning to take the same justifiably cynical view of their government’s
role in world affairs. Once again, as in the case of Syria, the American people
oppose the policy preferred by their elites: thankfully, however, the Beltway
crowd is too stupid and self-absorbed to heed that warning, their second in
a few months.

There are two things to keep in mind about the Ukrainian crisis. The first is that,
rhetoric aside, there is little that the West can or will do to force
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s troops out of Crimea. The second is that Russia’s view of what’s happening in Ukraine differs dramatically from the one commonly accepted here. If those who overthrew
the old order in Kyiv are counting on the West to protect them
militarily from Moscow, they are almost certainly doomed to
disappointment.

The
U.S., Canada, and other NATO members have made it clear that they are
not willing to go to war with Russia over Ukraine. There has been talk
of economic sanctions. But as both the West and Russia know, these would
cut two ways. In the short run,
Western Europe depends on Russian oil and natural gas. Russian rubles
grease Britain’s important financial industry. As the BBC reported,
British Prime Minister David Cameron has been warned by his own
officials against imposing sanctions that could interfere with London’s
role as a financial centre.

The
West could expel
Russia from the G8 group of big industrial nations. But so what? Many
countries, including China, get by perfectly well outside of the G8.
Resolutions condemning
Russia’s intervention in Ukraine’s Crimea region, such as the one
passed unanimously in the Commons Monday, may make the participants feel
virtuous. But they have no practical effect. Lost in the clamour is the
fact that Russia has an entirely different take on what is happening in
Ukraine.

In
the West, last
month’s revolution is lauded as a victory of democracy over despotism.
To Russia’s leaders, however, it was a Washington-backed putsch designed
to draw a region long deemed essential to Moscow’s security into the
enemy camp. U.S. President Barack Obama says Ukraine can both be a
friend to the West and to Russia. Putin’s press conference Tuesday was
marked by whoppers, including his claim that Russian troops in Crimea
are not Russian. But I suspect he was
speaking close to the heart when he accused the U.S. and its friends of
playing a crucial role in the “coup d’état” that brought Ukraine’s new
government to power.

“They
sit there across the pond as if in a lab running all kinds of
experiments on the rats,” Putin said. To Moscow, the decision to dig in
now follows logically from what it sees as two decades of Western
double-dealing. Canadians remember
that the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Russia remembers that, in
return, the U.S. and its allies agreed to recognize Moscow’s vital
interest in its own neighbourhood.

In particular, then U.S. president George Bush pledged not to expand NATO eastward. Yet to Russia’s
dismay, that pledge was soon broken as NATO welcomed 11 former Soviet
satellites into its fold, including Poland, Hungary and the Czech
Republic. In 2003 and 2004,
Western countries backed so-called colour revolutions in Georgia and
Ukraine. In 2008, NATO agreed that both would eventually be allowed to
join the military alliance.

The
West viewed all of this as the march of democracy. But Moscow saw it as
hypocritical meddling. Russia knows that the
U.S. accords itself the right to intervene militarily in the affairs of
its neighbours. It has famously done so throughout Latin America and the
Caribbean. Yet when Moscow does the same, it finds itself branded a
pariah. Being lectured on international law by the country that
illegally invaded Iraq almost certainly irks.

In a perfect world,
Moscow would abandon its strategic interests in Crimea (it’s been home
to Russia’s Black Sea fleet since 1783). In a perfect world, Russia
would not care if a united Ukraine joined NATO. In the real world,
this is unlikely to happen. For this crisis to end, Kyiv and Moscow will
have to reach some kind of political accommodation. Moral and financial support from the West may be cheering for Ukraine. But it won’t be enough.

Public discussion on Ukraine is all about confrontation. But do we
know where we are going? In my life, I have seen four wars begun with
great enthusiasm and public support, all of which we did not know how to
end and from three of which we withdrew unilaterally. The test of
policy is how it ends, not how it begins. Far too often the Ukrainian issue is posed as a showdown:
whether Ukraine joins the East or the West. But if Ukraine is to survive
and thrive, it must not be either side’s outpost against the other — it
should function as a bridge between them. Russia must accept that to try to force Ukraine into a satellite
status, and thereby move Russia’s borders again, would doom Moscow to
repeat its history of self-fulfilling cycles of reciprocal pressures
with Europe and the United States.

The West must understand that,
to Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country. Russian history
began in what was called Kievan-Rus. The Russian religion spread from
there. Ukraine has been part of Russia for centuries, and their
histories were intertwined before then. Some of the most important
battles for Russian freedom, starting with the Battle of Poltava in 1709
, were fought on Ukrainian soil. The Black Sea Fleet — Russia’s
means of projecting power in the Mediterranean — is based by long-term
lease in Sevastopol, in Crimea. Even such famed dissidents as Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky insisted that Ukraine was an integral
part of Russian history and, indeed, of Russia.

The European
Union must recognize that its bureaucratic dilatoriness and
subordination of the strategic element to domestic politics in
negotiating Ukraine’s relationship to Europe contributed to turning a
negotiation into a crisis. Foreign policy is the art of establishing
priorities.

The Ukrainians are the decisive element. They live in a country with a complex history and a polyglot
composition. The Western part was incorporated into the Soviet Union in
1939
, when Stalin and
Hitler divided up the spoils. Crimea, 60 percent of whose population is Russian
, became part of Ukraine
only in 1954, when Nikita Khrushchev, a Ukrainian by birth, awarded it as part
of the 300th-year celebration of a Russian agreement with the Cossacks.
The west is largely Catholic; the east largely Russian Orthodox. The
west speaks Ukrainian; the east speaks mostly Russian. Any attempt by
one wing of Ukraine to dominate the other — as has been the pattern —
would lead eventually to civil war or breakup. To treat Ukraine as part of an East-West confrontation would
scuttle for decades any prospect to bring Russia and the West —
especially Russia and Europe — into a cooperative international system.

Ukraine has been independent for only 23 years; it had previously been under some kind of foreign rule since the 14th century.
Not surprisingly, its leaders have not learned the art of compromise,
even less of historical perspective. The politics of post-independence
Ukraine clearly demonstrates that the root of the problem lies in
efforts by Ukrainian politicians to impose their will on recalcitrant
parts of the country, first by one faction, then by the other. That is
the essence of the conflict between Viktor Yanu­kovych and his principal
political rival, Yulia Tymo­shenko. They represent the two wings of
Ukraine and have not been willing to share power. A wise U.S. policy
toward Ukraine would seek a way for the two parts of the country to
cooperate with each other. We should seek reconciliation, not the
domination of a faction.

Russia and the West, and least of all the
various factions in Ukraine, have not acted on this principle. Each has
made the situation worse. Russia would not be able to impose a military
solution without isolating itself at a time when many of its borders
are already precarious. For the West, the demonization of Vladimir Putin
is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one.

Putin
should come to realize that, whatever his grievances, a policy of
military impositions would produce another Cold War. For its part, the
United States needs to avoid treating Russia as an aberrant to be
patiently taught rules of conduct established by Washington. Putin is a
serious strategist — on the premises of Russian history. Understanding
U.S. values and psychology are not his strong suits. Nor has
understanding Russian history and psychology been a strong point of U.S.
policymakers.

Leaders of all sides should return to examining
outcomes, not compete in posturing. Here is my notion of an outcome
compatible with the values and security interests of all sides:

1. Ukraine should have the right to choose freely its economic and political associations, including with Europe.

2. Ukraine should not join NATO, a position I took seven years ago, when it last came up.

3.
Ukraine should be free to create any government compatible with the
expressed will of its people. Wise Ukrainian leaders would then opt for a
policy of reconciliation between the various parts of their country.
Internationally, they should pursue a posture comparable to that of
Finland. That nation leaves no doubt about its fierce independence and
cooperates with the West in most fields but carefully avoids
institutional hostility toward Russia.

4. It is incompatible with
the rules of the existing world order for Russia to annex Crimea. But it
should be possible to put Crimea’s relationship to Ukraine on a less
fraught basis. To that end, Russia would recognize Ukraine’s sovereignty
over Crimea. Ukraine should reinforce Crimea’s autonomy in elections
held in the presence of international observers. The process would
include removing any ambiguities about the status of the Black Sea Fleet
at Sevastopol.

These are principles, not prescriptions. People
familiar with the region will know that not all of them will be
palatable to all parties. The test is not absolute satisfaction but
balanced dissatisfaction. If some solution based on these or comparable
elements is not achieved, the drift toward confrontation will
accelerate. The time for that will come soon enough.

Is
Vladimir Putin crazy? Former U.S. secretary of
state Madeleine Albright says Putin is “delusional.” Germany’s Angela
Merkel says he’s “out of touch with reality.”

I have no idea if he’s crazy and I don’t think it
matters. According to The Psychopath Test, numerous CEOs and politicians
make the cut based on criteria like their ability to blithely take
decisions that wreck millions of lives. And if you look at what he’s
actually done, I doubt it matters either. If you designed a computer
program to react “rationally” on the model of great power leaders
pursuing what’s consensually viewed as the National Interest, it would
probably “behave” as Putin has, or perhaps more drastically.

When the Soviet Union broke up, the West said it
wouldn’t advance against Russia militarily. Since then it’s tightened a
NATO noose around Russia’s neck: Poland, Hungary, the Baltic states, the
threat of missiles based near Russian borders. When the Soviets put
missiles in Cuba in 1962, the U.S. went berserk, metaphorically or
literally, blithely promising to incinerate the planet in response. Was
John F. Kennedy delusional? Does it matter? It’s how great powers
behave, especially in their own backyard.

I think this is wretched, immoral bullying — maybe
I should put that in caps: THIS IS ODIOUS BEHAVIOUR — and bullied
nations like Ukraine are right to protest, just as people in Latin
America hate it when the U.S. does it. But it’s normal great power
activity, crazy or not. By the way, Madeleine Albright, who’s presumably
non-delusional, was asked in 1996 if half a million dead Iraqi kids was
a “price” worth paying to assert U.S. power in far-off Iraq. She said:
“We think the price is worth it.” Please note her use of “we” —
indicating a possible collective psychosis.

Is he Hitler? It’s always springtime for Hitler
analogies. Hillary Clinton has done it, also U.S. Senators John McCain,
Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham and lesser luminaries. But the only
government leaders who’ve taken that plunge are Stephen Harper and
Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird. I think the distinction is
significant. Out of power, you can say anything since your only purpose
is to get elected or re-elected. When you hold power, like Harper and
Baird, you might actually have an effect so you tend to be more cautious
and less stupid. Except for our guys.

I’d say what this shows is that Harperites have
simply abandoned foreign policy as anything except a way to sweep up
votes. They’ve already made themselves irrelevant in forums like global
climate conferences or the UN; they just don’t give a damn. If you want
to become a Canadian diplomat, forget working your way up or getting
degrees in global affairs. Become head of the PM’s security detail or
shill for the Israeli government instead. This must be discouraging for
generations of civil servants. I agree with Yves Engler that Canadian
diplomats were never neutral “brokers”; they acted mostly in the
interest of the U.S. But that was sometimes useful, offering a little
distance from the boss. That’s all gone, too.

The dilemma of the squares. There have always been
spontaneous outbreaks of democratic will, like the Paris Commune or
slave revolts. There’s a collective as well as an individual need to
control one’s life. But recently the eruption and takeover of public
spaces — in Tunis, Cairo, Madrid, Wall St., Kyiv’s Maidan — seem more
coherent and continuous, perhaps due to social media.

These movements are the lifeblood of democratic
renewal. They’re also susceptible to manipulation. Ukraine’s Orange
Revolution of 2004 seemed far more stage-managed by western forces like
the U.S.’s National Endowment for Democracy or George Soros’ Open
Society Institute than the Maidan has been. But there’s no doubt the
same forces still operate. See the phone intercepts from U.S. diplomat
Victoria Nuland. They make these eruptions vulnerable to charges of
being illegitimate fakes.

The trick is finding a way to link the genuine
popular outbursts to institutionalized, constitutional, representative
forms. I know that’s a mouthful but I don’t think anyone’s come up with a
solution. Yet who wants to be stuck with merely voting in the
occasional election, then going to sleep for another four years? If
anyone has the answer, please write or call.

Russia's aggressive push into Crimea is a "defensive" move by President
Vladimir Putin to keep his country politically and economically viable,
conservative commentator and former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan
says.

"Crimea
is probably Russia's foreseeable future for sure . . . I don't
agree with those who say this is a beginning of a big new move across
Europe," Buchanan told "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV. "It is a
move by Putin to make sure that he does not lose Crimea . . .
the way he has lost the Ukraine politically and otherwise. So, in that
sense, it's defensive.
"But no doubt it's a crossing the borders and a capture of territory
which does not legally belong to Russia. You can conclude from that what
you wish," Buchanan said Tuesday.

A
pro-Russian regional government was installed in Crimea earlier this
month after armed men seized the parliament building and raised the
Russian flag.
Crimea is set to hold a referendum Sunday on whether the peninsula
should become part of Russia or remain within Ukraine. Buchanan, who has
run for president and hosted CNN's "Crossfire," does
not think the Crimean takeover is the beginning of a new Cold War.

"The heart of the Cold War was the communist ideology . . . It was an
ideology which juggled the globe, which was determined basically to
eliminate Western civilization rivals, become a guiding philosophy,
religion, whatever you want to call it, the entire world, and that no
longer exists," Buchanan said.

"Whatever you say about Vladimir Putin, he is trying to restore the
Russian Orthodox faith, which is far different from Leninism or
communism. "What he is trying to do with the other elements of the old Soviet Union
is to bring them together in an economic union, not again in a
political union as far as I can see."

Buchanan
said Putin's methods of seizure are also different from those of the
old Soviet Union. "The manner at which he is taking Crimea is nothing
like the manner
Stalin behaved in the Ukraine . . . They murdered between 5 and 9
million people," he said.

The Estonian Foreign Ministry has confirmed the recording of his
conversation with EU foreign policy chief is authentic. Urmas Paet said
that snipers who shot at protesters and police in Kiev were hired by
Maidan leaders. Paet told RIA-Novosti news agency that he talked to Catherine Ashton last week right after
retiring from Kiev, but refrained from further comments, saying
that he has to “listen to the tape first.”

“It’s very disappointing that such surveillance took place
altogether. It’s not a coincidence that this conversation was
uploaded [to the web] today,” he stressed. “My conversation with Ashton took place last week right after
I returned from Kiev. At that time I was already in
Estonia,” Paet added.

Paet also gave a press conference about the leaked tape on
Wednesday, saying that the dramatic events in Kiev, which
resulted in people being killed, must become the subject of an
independent investigation. The Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs also issued a statement
on its website, saying that the recording of the leaked telephone
conversation between Paet and Ashton is “authentic.”

The phone call took place on February 26 after Estonia’s FM
returned from his visit to Ukraine, which took place soon after
the end of street violence in Kiev, the ministry added.

“We reject the claim that Paet was giving an assessment of the
opposition’s involvement in the violence," the statement
stressed, adding that the FM was only providing an overview of
what he had heard during his Kiev visit. RT has contacted Ashton’s spokesperson, Maja Kocijancic, who said
“we don’t comment on leaked phone conversations.”

The US government declined to comment on the leaked phone
conversation between EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton
and the Estonian foreign affairs minister. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said she had nothing to
say on the issue, ITAR-TASS reported. However, she did accuse
Russia of leaking the tape, stating that “this was another
example of how the Russians work.”

The call took place after Estonia’s Foreign Minister Urmas Paet
visited Kiev on February 25, following the peak of clashes
between the pro-EU protesters and security forces in the
Ukrainian capital.

It was reportedly uploaded to the web by officers of the Security
Service of Ukraine (SBU) loyal to ousted President Viktor
Yanukovich who hacked Paet’s and Ashton’s phones.
During the conversation, Paet stressed that “there is now
stronger and stronger understanding that behind the snipers, it
was not Yanukovich, but it was somebody from the new
coalition.” According to the Estonian FM, “all the evidence shows”
that the “same snipers” at Maidan were shooting at
people from both sides – the police and the protesters.
Ashton reacted to the information by saying: “Well,
yeah…that’s, that’s terrible,” adding that the matter is
worth investigating.
94 people were killed and another 900 injured during the standoff
between police and protesters at Maidan Saquare in Kiev last
month.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei
Lavrov on Saturday called for an OSCE investigation into who was behind
the deaths of dozens of people in Kiev last month in attacks by snipers,
saying the truth could no longer be "covered up". Lavrov's
comments came after Estonia's top diplomat told EU foreign policy chief
Catherine Ashton in a phone call leaked this weak that the
then-Ukrainian opposition to president Viktor Yanukovych may have been
involved in the attacks.

"The
latest information about the so-called snipers case can no longer be
covered up," Lavrov told a news conference in Moscow with his Tajik
counterpart. "We have proposed
that the OSCE (Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe)
takes up an objective investigation of this and we will ensure there is
justice. "There have been too
many lies, and this lie has been used too long to push European public
opinion in the wrong direction, contrary to the objective facts."

Western
states have blamed Yanukovych's now disbanded elite riot police force
for much of the killing that rocked in Kiev in February. However
Russia has strongly emphasised the leaked phone call between Estonian
Foreign Minister Urmas Paet and Ashton as evidence for its argument that
the new post-Yanukovych government in Kiev is made up of dangerous
extremists. Lavrov's call for a
full probe indicates that this is an issue Russia will not allow to
drop, risking new tensions with the West. In
the audio of the February 26 call, whose authenticity was confirmed by
Estonia, Paet told Ashton he was informed in Kiev that "they were the
same snipers killing people from both sides."

Dozens of protesters and around 15 police officers were killed in the attacks. Paet,
who had held talks with Ukraine's new leaders on February 25, added:
"It's really disturbing that now the new coalition, they don't want to
investigate what exactly happened."

Russia could reduce to zero its
economic dependency on the United States if Washington agreed sanctions
against Moscow over Ukraine, a Kremlin aide said on Tuesday, warning
that the American financial system faced a "crash" if this happened. "We would find a
way not just to reduce our dependency on the United States to zero but
to emerge from those sanctions with great benefits for ourselves," said
Kremlin economic aide Sergei Glazyev.

He
told the RIA Novosti news agency Russia could stop using dollars for
international transactions and create its own payment system using its
"wonderful trade and economic relations with our partners in the East
and South." Russian firms and banks would also not return loans from American financial institutions, he said.

"An
attempt to announce sanctions would end in a crash for the financial
system of the United States, which would cause the end of the domination
of the United States in the global financial system," he added. He
said that economic sanctions imposed by the European Union would be a
"catastrophe" for Europe, saying that Russia could halt gas supplies
"which would be beneficial for the Americans" and give the Russian
economy a useful "impulse".

Glazyev has long been seen
as among the most hawkish of the advisors to President Vladimir Putin
but many observers have seen his hand in the apparent radicalisation of
policy on Ukraine since the overthrow of president Viktor Yanukovych. Economists
have long mocked his apocalyptic and confrontational vision of global
economics but also expressed concern that he appears to have grown in
authority in recent months. A
high ranking Kremlin source told RIA Novosti that Glazyev was speaking
in the capacity of an "academic" and his personal opinion did not
reflect the official Kremlin policy.

Glazyev
descrived the new Ukrainian authorities as "illegitimate and
Russophobic", saying some members of the government were on lists of
"terrorist organisations, they are criminals". "If the authorities
remain criminal then I think the people of Ukraine will get rid of them
soon," he added.

After an urgent closed meeting of the heads of Russian defense
enterprises, Deputy PM Dmitry Rogozin said that possible economic
sanctions could stimulate Russian industry and only hurt its foreign
partners. The meeting took place on Thursday and afterwards the man in
charge of the Russian weapons industry announced the decisions
via a Twitter post.

“The result of the conversation with our industry leaders:
the possible economic sanctions would only force it to work
better and follow the policy of import replacement,” Rogozin
tweeted. “Instead, the boomerang of sanctions would hit and
hurt foreign partners,” the official added.

“Hard to believe that in the conditions of a continuing
economic recession Western politicians find some pleasure in
hurting the businesses that use Russian markets as the only
opportunity to maintain the production and to keep jobs,”
Rogozin wrote.

The Deputy PM paid special attention to the situation in Ukraine
because of the close ties between Russian and Ukrainian weapons
companies dating back to the centralized economy of the Soviet
Union. In early February he expressed hope that economic
cooperation with Russia could help Ukraine create more jobs and
eventually end the social tensions ravaging the country.

Earlier this week, veteran Russian parliamentarian and head of
the Liberal Democratic Party Vladimir Zhirinovsky told reporters
that the sanctions would not have any negatively impact the
Russian economy directly. “The USA is ready to support anyone
if this would help them spite Russia, this is still the remnants
of the Cold War,” the politician noted.

The European Union and the United States have threatened Russia
with various sanctions over its position on the Ukrainian
political crisis and the support to the Crimean Autonomous
Republic that is currently preparing a referendum on possible
succession from Ukraine and joining the Russian Federation. The
measures include visa bans, asset freezes and various economic
restrictions. Polish PM Donald Tusk told the press on Tuesday
that the decision to impose sanctions had already been made and
they would start as soon as Monday.

The US authorities announced last week that they had imposed visa
restrictions on Russian and Crimean officials and private
citizens who they accused of “threatening Ukraine’s
sovereignty and integrity.”

The move prompted telephone talks between Russian Foreign
Minister Sergey Lavrov and US State Secretary John Kerry as well
as a telephone conversation between presidents Vladimir Putin and
Barack Obama FM Lavrov warned that any sanctions against Russia will have a
“boomerang” effect and urged Washington to steer away
from actions that could hurt relations between the countries.

President Putin explained to President Obama that Russia could
not ignore the pleas for help from the Ukrainian Russian-speaking
population, and that all Russia’s actions were in full compliance
with international law. He also emphasized that he regarded
Russian-US relations as of paramount importance to guarantee
stability and security in the world.

“These relations should not be sacrificed to differences over
individual – even though very important – international
problems,” Putin said according to the press release issued
after the talks.

EU sanctions are ‘stupid’ and will ‘sabotage’ the West – Rosneft spokesperson

A list has surfaced containing the names of more than 100 Russian
businessmen and politicians allegedly targeted for EU economic
sanctions. German newspaper Bild reported Igor Sechin, CEO of the
world’s largest-listed oil company is on the list. Alexey Miller, head of state-owned Gazprom and Vladimir Yankunin,
who runs Russian Railways, are both rumored to be on the ‘list’.

"This is stupid, petty and obvious sabotage of themselves
most of all," Rosneft spokesman Mikhail Leontyev said by
phone, Reuters reports. Rosneft’s official comment echoes that of Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s
foreign minister, who warned any sanctions against Moscow will have a
“boomerang” effect."I hope this all ends up as being empty rhetoric,"
Leontyev said in response to the Bild’s report that Sechin is on
the list of key targets.

The US and EU have warned that Russia’s actions in Crimea will be
followed by economic sanctions, and it won’t be “business as
usual” with Russia. More precise actions are expected on March
17, following a referendum vote in Crimea taking place this Sunday. On Wednesday, the EU agreed to issue visa bans and freeze assets
of anyone who was “responsible” for undermining the
territorial integrity of Ukraine, including key politicians,
state-owned banks, commercial organization, and other state
agencies.

In response,
Russia said it could issue counter
sanctions against the EU and US if they push sanctions, which may
include freezing the assets of Western companies and individuals.
Rosneft has increased earnings this year by more than 50 percent,
company officials announced on Tuesday. Rosneft accounts for 40
percent of Russia’s oil output.

Rosneft’s western partners

"I think this would primarily affect Rosneft's business
partners in the West in an extraordinary way,” the spokesman
said.

Rosneft has strong strategic partnerships worldwide. Some of the
biggest projects are with China’s state-owned oil companies as
the country looks east to growing Asian markets, rather than west
for expanding markets. In 2013, net income reached $15.6 billion, which pushed the
company’s market capitalization to $72.8 billion. In 2013 the
company’s capitalization increased by 18 percent, much of this
due to the acquisition of TNK-BP.

US-based ExxonMobil is planning a $500 billion exploration of the
Bazhenov oil field in Western Siberia, and a separate Far East
liquefied natural gas terminal project costing $15 billion. The
project is aimed at expanding the company’s influence in the
East. Exxon has also partnered with Rosneft to explore Black Sea
reserves, which lie under Crimean waters.

Another big project is with Norway’s Statoil, to explore the
continental shelf in the Barents Sea. In Japan, Rosneft has
signed a deal to jointly explore oil and gas in the Sea of
Okhotsk with INPEX, Japan’s largest energy exporter.

As CEO, Sechin may be best-known for his affinity for oil deals
in Venezuela, where the CEO often makes personal trips. Rosneft’s
influence in Venezuela ranges from exploring
‘sand oil’ in the Orinoco River delta to huge offshore projects.

'You just don't in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by
invading another country on completely trumped up pretext," declared
John Kerry on March 2 as Russia began its conquest of Ukraine's Crimean
peninsula. Though he didn't intend it, the U.S. Secretary of State was
summing up the difference between the current leaders of the West who
inhabit a fantasy world of international rules and the hard men of the
Kremlin who understand the language of power. The 19th-century men are
winning.

***

Vladimir Putin consolidated his hold on
Crimea Sunday by forcing a referendum with only two choices. Residents
of the Ukrainian region could vote either to join Russia immediately or
to do so eventually. The result was a foregone conclusion, midwifed by
Russian troops and anti-Ukraine propaganda. Russia's Foreign Minister
Sergei Lavrov dismissed Mr. Kerry's pleas for restraint on Friday in
London, and Russia vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution denouncing
the Crimean takeover a day later.

Next up for conquest may be
eastern Ukraine. Russian troops are massed on the border, and on
Saturday its soldiers and helicopter gunships crossed from Crimea and
occupied a natural gas plant on the Ukrainian mainland. Scuffles and
demonstrations in the eastern Ukrainian cities of Donetsk and Kharkiv,
egged on by Russian agitators, could create another "trumped up
pretext." And what is to stop Mr. Putin? In the two weeks since Russian
troops occupied Crimea, President Obama and Europe have done little but
threaten "consequences" that Mr. Putin has little reason to take
seriously.

The U.S. has refused Ukraine's request for urgent
military aid, and it has merely sent a few NATO planes to the Baltic
states and Poland. The Russian strongman might figure he's better off
seizing more territory now and forcing the West to accept his facts on
the ground. All the more so given that his domestic popularity is
soaring as he seeks to revive the 19th-century Russian empire. Left
in shambles are the illusions of Mr. Obama and his fellow liberal
internationalists. They arrived at the White House proclaiming that the
days of U.S. leadership had to yield to a new collective security
enforced by "the international community." The U.N. would be the
vanguard of this new 21st-century order, and "international law" and
arms-control treaties would define its rules.

Thus Mr. Obama's
initial response to Mr. Putin's Crimean invasion was to declare, like
Mr. Kerry, that it is "illegal" because it violates "the Ukrainian
constitution and international law." As if Mr. Putin cares. The
19th-century men understand that what defines international order is the
cold logic of political will and military power. With American power in
retreat, the revanchists have moved to fill the vacuum with a new world
disorder.

Backed by Iran and Russia, Bashar Assad is advancing
in Syria and may soon crush the opposition. Iran is arming the terrorist
militias to the north and south of Israel. China is pressing its
regional territorial claims and building its military. And Mr. Putin is
blowing apart post-Cold War norms by carving up foreign countries when
he feels he can. The question now is whether Mr. Obama and his
advisers will shed their 21st-century fantasies and push back against
the new Bonapartes. Jimmy Carter finally awoke after the Soviets invaded
Afghanistan, but Mr. Obama hasn't shown the same awareness of what is
happening on his watch.

We've written about the need for broad
economic and financial sanctions against Russia and its elites. Skeptics
reply that Europe will never go along. Even if that's true—and that
would mean a failure of U.S. diplomacy—it shouldn't deter the U.S. from
imposing its own banking and financial sanctions. The world's banks can
be made to face a choice between doing business with Russia or doing
business in America. We know from the Bush Administration's experience
with North Korea that such sanctions bite.

The West must also meet Mr. Putin's military aggression with a
renewed military deterrent. This does not mean a strike on Russia or
invading Crimea. It should mean offering military aid to Ukraine to
raise the price of further Russian intervention. Above all it means
reinforcing NATO to show Mr. Putin that invading a treaty ally would
lead to war. The U.S. and Europe should move quickly to forward
deploy forces to Poland, the Baltic states and other front-line NATO
nations. This should include troops in addition to planes and armor.
Reviving an updated version of the Bush-era missile defense installation
in Eastern Europe is also warranted, including advanced interceptors
that could eventually be used against Russian ICBMs.

Russia's
revanchism should also finally awaken Europeans to spend more on their
own defense. The 19th-century men know that nationalism isn't dead as a
mobilizing political force. Western Europe's leaders will have to
relearn this reality or their dreams of European peace will be
shattered. They need more modern arms of their own in addition to
America's through NATO. In response to the Crimean referendum
Sunday, the White House issued a statement declaring that, "In this
century, we are long past the days when the international community will
stand quietly by while one country forcibly seizes the territory of
another." We shall see, but Mr. Obama first needs to understand that
America's adversaries reject his fanciful 21st-century rules.

Heavier U.S. and European Union
sanctions could sting Russia's already slow-growing economy and hurt its
financial sector. But Moscow could retaliate and seize American and
other foreign assets or cut exports of natural gas to Europe, which is
heavily dependent on Russia for energy.

Russian
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Friday warned Secretary of State John
Kerry that U.S. sanctions could "backfire," the Russian foreign
ministry said in a statement. During a telephone call, Lavrov urged the
U.S. not to take "hasty, poorly thought-out steps that could harm
Russian-U.S. relations, especially concerning sanctions, which would
unavoidably boomerang on the U.S. itself," the statement said.

In
a separate statement on Friday, the Russian Foreign Ministry also
warned the European Union that any sanctions it imposed would not go
unanswered and would harm "the interests of the EU itself and its member
nations."

Declaring his
determination not to let the Kremlin carve up Ukraine, President Barack
Obama on Thursday slapped new visa restrictions on Russian and other
opponents of Ukraine's government in Kiev and authorized wider financial
penalties against those involved in the military intervention or in
stealing state assets. Obama emphasized his resolve in an hourlong
telephone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, affirming his
contention that Russia's actions violate Ukraine's sovereignty.

On Capitol Hill, both chambers of Congress looked to advance legislation imposing hard-hitting sanctions on Russia.

Obama hailed U.S.
cooperation with the European Union, which on Thursday suspended talks
with Putin's government on a wide-ranging economic agreement and on
granting Russian citizens visa-free travel within the 28-nation bloc.
But Europe's presidents and prime ministers remain divided on taking
more drastic steps such as freezing assets and issuing travel bans on
Russian officials.

European
hesitancy reflected the reality that targeting influential Russian
businessmen or major Russian companies would also harm Europe's economic
interests. U.S. trade with Russia is less than one-tenth of Europe's.

Russian
investors hold assets worth billions in European banks, particularly in
Britain, which is highly protective of its financial sector, and major
exporters such as Germany and the Netherlands have far more at stake
than the United States in Russia's consumer economy.

Showing
greater caution than Obama on sanctions, German Chancellor Angela
Merkel said European penalties against Russia depend "on how the
diplomatic process progresses." EU President Herman Van Rompuy said
travel bans, asset freezes and the cancellation of an EU-Russia summit
could still come. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk acknowledged "no
enthusiasm" in Europe for economic sanctions.

In
some ways, the debate over sanctions echoes the Cold War doctrine of
military strategy in which if two opponents fired off nuclear weapons,
both sides would be annihilated.

"There
is a kind of mutually assured destruction relationship here," said
Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and analyst at the
Brookings Institution think tank in Washington. "Russia could say,
'Well, we're going to cut off your gas, and you guys can now scramble
and buy extra gas and pay big prices.'

"It
would hurt the Europeans, but it also would cut off the biggest source
of cash that flows into Russia today," he said referring to oil and gas
sales that account for about 60 percent of Russia's exports and half of
its government revenue. "So the Russians may threaten some things, but
they also have to consider that if they do that what it would do to the
Russian economy."

The West should forget about punishing Russia and do more to help Ukraine

The United States
and the European Union
both announced aid packages for Ukraine last week. But with the new
government in Kiev struggling to clean house after the corrupt rule of
Viktor Yanukovych and face down a belligerent Russia, the aid packages
are too small and will disburse too slowly to provide the immediate help
it needs.Ukraine’s
current crisis is typically miscast as a political conflict between
East and West—between pro-Russian Yanukovych and Europhile opposition
leader Yulia Tymoshenko; between the country’s Russian-speaking eastern
regions and its Ukrainian-speaking western half; and between Russia and
its old Cold War adversaries. These political clashes are, however,
byproducts of a much more profound, long-simmering Ukrainian economic
crisis that has been decades in the making.

Since its independence in 1991, Ukraine hasn’t been economically viable. Though it is one of the world’s top cereal producers,
its manufacturing infrastructure is tired and its steel industry is
obsolete. It adds to these woes by rigging its currency at artificially
high levels, making consumer imports cheap, but exports uncompetitive.The
economy is also dangerously dependent on natural gas imports from
Russia that power about 40% of Ukraine’s electricity production. The
supply contracts for Russia’s natural gas provide a cover for massive
corruption by Russian and Ukrainian interests, as Quartz’s Steve LeVine notes. The
problem is compounded by huge Ukrainian government subsidies: Kiev pays
about 80% of the cost of Russian gas imports. In theory, it passes the
remaining 20% on to consumers and businesses, but the government’s
collection efforts are spotty.

As
a result, the Ukrainian state has racked up debt equivalent to about
40% of GDP. That’s not massive compared with other troubled
countries—Greece’s debt-to-GDP ratio exceeds 150%—but it’s more than
Ukraine and most emerging markets can sustain.

Ukraine is living on borrowed time

Through
the 1990s and early 2000s, foreign appetite for Ukrainian grain and
steel kept the country afloat. But with the 2008 financial crisis,
demand for Ukrainian exports crashed. Rather than adjusting their
spending, successive Ukrainian governments flirted alternately with
Russia and the West to paper over the country’s financial cracks.With
IMF support, the government set reform programs in motion in 2008 and
2010 to put the country on a sounder financial footing. But both IMF
loans were suspended when Ukraine reneged on promised reforms. Accession
talks with the European Union stalled. Kiev turned to Moscow for help,
and replaced Western financing with $15 billion in support from Russia
combined with $7 billion of natural gas discounts. All of that got
pulled when Yanukovych fled office a few weeks ago.

Ukraine
is now living on borrowed time. Around $20 billion in debt comes due
over the next two years. That’s $20 billion the Ukrainian government
can’t finance. Its other financing needs are murky: No-one trusts the
Kiev authorities’ numbers. An IMF mission arrived in Kiev last week to
set the facts straight, but it won’t report back to Washington for
another week.In
any case, a crisis two decades in the making can’t be undone in the 18
to 36 months of a typical IMF-supported reform program. As for the
American and European aid, it will also likely carry conditions the
fledgling Ukrainian government can’t fulfill in the coming months. The
government has already started slashing pensions and social spending to
meet the West’s demands. Rather than shoring up the interim
administration, this is a recipe for disaster ahead of May elections.

Kiev needs more money, and sooner

Ukraine
needs more time to reform its economy and put it on a sustainable
path. The West should make its offer of aid more realistic.First,
the US and EU need to front-load their aid packages and make them
richer. The American offer of $1 billion in loan guarantees would make
only a dent in Ukraine’s financing needs. Europe’s $11 billion aid
package would release only about $1.6 billion this year, and then only
on agreement to widespread reforms and a deal with the IMF. To dispel
any fear of a debt default and defer crippling spending cuts, the US and
Europe should offer Ukraine $20 billion over the next two years, of
which $7 billion to $10 billion should be upfront in liquid non-project
financing.Second,
the West needs to ensure that IMF money carries fewer strings and
disburses faster than past loans. The Ukrainian government has requested
$15 billion from the IMF, but this is likely to come in two parts:
perhaps $1 billion under an emergency facility, with the rest over the
next three years once Kiev has agreed to tough conditions.Third, the West needs to open unilaterally and immediately its markets to Ukrainian goods by dropping tariff barriers.

Punishing Russia won’t achieve anything

Diplomatic
isolation, asset freezes, and travel bans may be appropriate, but are
unlikely to have much impact on Russia. Economic and financial sanctions
that would actually bite aren’t credible. Russia does $100 billion in
annual trade with Europe. One-third of European natural gas comes from
Russia. The $3 billion in transit fees on that gas constitute Ukraine’s
largest service export. And London’s banks house billions in oligarchs’
assets. Europe needs Russia and Vladimir Putin knows it.Likewise,
musings about the US using its abundant shale gas or releases from its
Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to drive down global energy prices and
hurt Russia’s exports are fantasies. It will be years before the US has the infrastructure needed
to export its gas surplus. And SPR releases turn the screws on Russia
only if OPEC, or at least the Saudis, check their production too.

Finally,
helping Ukraine is diplomatically easier than sanctioning Russia. In
contrast with the UN Security Council, where Russian and Chinese vetoes
hamper action, the US and Europe have enough voting power on the IMF
Executive Board to approve a large loan with few strings to Ukraine.
They should use that power. Solve
Ukraine’s economic problems, and you stop Kiev’s oscillating tease
between East and West. Help Ukraine’s emerging leaders make the country
economically sustainable, and you make Ukraine a bridge between East and
West rather than a flash point of tension. Henry Kissinger asks how the Ukraine crisis ends. The answer: When we start sending real money to Kiev.

The Russian Foreign Ministry has answered SOS signals coming from the
disbanded Ukrainian riot police “Berkut.” The ministry ordered the
prompt issue of Russian passports for the officers, who have been
threatened by lynch mobs. "The Consulate General in Simferopol has started giving out
Russian passports to officers of the special Berkut forces, based
on the applications it has received,” the consulate’s
spokesperson Evgeniya Kaplunenko told Itar-Tass.

The Berkut officers who choose to get a Russian citizenship will
be offered career opportunities in some regions of Russia,
Russian Interior Ministry’s press-service said earlier on Friday.

The governor of Russia’s Astrakhan region has announced that
“if needed, the Region can accept, accommodate and provide
social, rehabilitation and other help for Berkut officers and
their families,” adding that they will not be left without
employment there. Other regions have also offered help to Ukrainians in general,
who found themselves in “difficult circumstances,”
according to Itar-Tass.

On Saturday, Russia’s Consul General in Simferopol, Vyacheslav
Svetlichny, said he did not exclude the possibility of
Russian passports being issued not only for ex-Berkut officers,
but also for all Ukrainian citizens who wanted them. “That could be possible,” Svetlichny told RIA Novosti.
“We will be solving these issues gradually.”

The news came as a surprise for some of the Berkut unit members,
who not only were left without a job, but have also been showered
with threats to themselves and their families.

“The people who have come to power do not need us; to them,
we are enemies. We have been threatened, they want to execute us.
Of course, in such conditions we will be glad to receive any kind
of protection,” a Crimea-based Berkut officer told RIA
Novosti on condition of anonymity. According to the officer, he has only just learned about Russian
Foreign Ministry’s statement, and will now spread the word to
Berkut officers in other parts of Ukraine.

Berkut, the Ukrainian riot police that took a prominent part in
trying supress the riots in Kiev, which started at the end of
November, became “arch-enemies” of Maidan, have largely
been demonized both at home and in the Western media. The
officers in the unit are usually mentioned in connection with the
brutal ejection of Maidan protesters on November 30 that they
actually carried out, or are presented as cold-blooded murderers
of dozens of unarmed people during last week’s bloody street
battles in Kiev, which is yet to be proven.

However, few mention the other side of the story: weeks of having
to stand on duty and obey orders with a hail of stones,
pyrotechnics and petrol bombs raining down on their heads, with
groups of violent armed rioters always waiting for an officer to
be separated from a group to beat him to a bloody pulp, or with
some “revolutionary engineers” reportedly mixing up
flammables and toxic substances behind the scenes on Maidan to
test inextinguishable fire on living human beings.

Berkut’s body armor, which many of the reporters cited, did not
mean they were not burnt, shot in the neck or the head by the
armed rioters, or had their limbs and other body parts broken.
While “only” 16 law enforcement officers, including those of
Berkut, were killed in Kiev clashes, hundreds more were injured,
and many were hospitalized with serious gunshot wounds. However,
while the new Ukrainian authorities promised the strictest
possible investigation into “crimes against humanity” by
President Viktor Yanukovich or into the “deaths of peaceful
protesters” in central Kiev, they apparently crossed out any
responsibility on the part of the armed radical groups, including
the Right Sector.

Ukrainian nationalists are suggesting the Russian language could be
banned in the country, so the populist Russian nationalist LDPR party
suggests fast-tracking Russian citizenship for ethnic Russians in
Ukraine and their families.

MP Ilya Drozdov of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia on
Monday initiated a bill that allows Russian citizenship within
six month if the applicant successfully proves his or hers
Russian ethnicity. This can be done by presenting documents
proving that any of one’s direct ancestors had Russian
citizenship by birth. The politician also mentioned grandparents
and great-grandparents, apparently meaning that citizenship of
the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire can count as well.

Drozdov emphasized that his suggestion came about because of the
current political situation in Ukraine. “The adoption of this
amendment would allow to lawfully use the migration potential of
Ukrainian citizens of Russian ethnicity who desire to get Russian
citizenship,” the lawmaker explained. He added that the
potential influx of ethnic Russians would help to stabilize their
number in the country and prevent their replacement by people
from Central Asian states.

On Sunday the Ukrainian parliament canceled the 2012 law “On
State Language Policy” that allowed the country’s regions to add
more official languages to the existing Ukrainian, if these
languages were used by over 10 percent of population. The law was
originally passed in the interests of the Russian-speaking
industrial eastern part of the country where regional
legislatures quickly officially recognized the Russian language,
but also benefited two Western regions that have introduced
Romanian and Hungarian as official languages, and the Crimea
Region where lot of people speak Tatar. Currently, the Eastern
regions face mass demonstrations against the “Maidan” policies
and newly-appointed officials and most of all against the
infringement of the rights of the Russian speaking population.

According to some sources, the head of the Freedom Party, Oleg
Tyagnibok has recently spoke before his supporters in Kiev and
said that the use of Russian language should be criminalized and
all ethnic Russians should be stripped of citizenship and live
under the non-citizen status.

At the same time, Tyagnibok has said that the recent cancellation
of the language law was technical and promised to introduce a new
non-discriminative bill in the near future. He gave no details.

Russia had a simplified procedure of citizenship for residents of
former Soviet republics from the collapse of the USSR till 2009.
Over 2 million people have used this scheme and become Russians.
The rule has never been based on ethnicity though – for example,
many residents of the Republic of South Ossetia are ethnic
Ossetians – the Caucasian people of Iranian roots – and yet many
of them have received Russian passports hoping for protection
from neighboring Georgia.

In 2012 Vladimir Putin voiced an initiative to simplify the
citizenship procedure for the residents of the former Soviet
Union and descendants of Russian emigrants, but it has not yet
ended in a law.

The Russian ambassador to Ukraine has been recalled to Moscow for
consultations in connection with the political situation in the
country. On Monday Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev
commented. “We do not understand what is going on there,
there is a real threat to our interests and to the lives and
health of our citizens,” he noted.

Medvedev also added that currently Ukraine lacked legitimate
representatives of authority, and expressed surprise over Western
politicians holding opposite opinions.

“Strictly speaking, today there is no one there to communicate
with. The legitimacy of a number of power bodies is in huge
doubt,” the Prime Minister said at a press conference. “If
you consider people in black masks strolling through Kiev with
Kalashnikov rifles a government, then it will be difficult for us
to work with such a government," Medvedev stated.

“Some our foreign, western partners hold the opposite
opinion, they think these people to be legitimate power bodies. I
do not know what constitution and what laws they have been
reading, but I hold that it is some sort of conscience aberration
when you call something legitimate while in reality it is a
result of a mutiny,” the Russian official told reporters.

Armed
groups of Cossacks from across the area are flocking to the disputed
region to help Moscow wrest it from Ukraine in hopes they'll be rewarded
by being integrated into Russia's primary security apparatus after the
takeover is complet.

On Monday morning, about 150 Cossack officers got together in
Crimea, the breakaway region of Ukraine, and lined up in formation on
the central square of the regional capital Simferopol. Bundled up
against the winds that blew in that day from the Black Sea, they made
for a sorry sight, disheveled and grumpy, like a reunion of elderly
veterans kitted out in old, mismatching camouflage gear. But their
commander, Vladimir Cherkashin, stood before them in a leather jacket
and military cap to say their fortunes were about to change.

Next week, a referendum on Crimea’s independence from Ukraine
will open the door for Russia to annex the entire Crimean Peninsula, and
for the local Cossack paramilitary groups, that marks the opportunity
of a lifetime. It would mean a chance to be integrated into the Russian
security forces — just like their Cossack brothers to the east have been
under Russian President Vladimir Putin. “That means state recognition,
it means training for our cadets,” Cherkashin explained to his Cossack
commanders, who are known as atamans. “It’s status. You understand? It’s
all about finances!” At this, the group of men looked around at one
another and grumbled in approval. Then, at Cherkashin’s command, they
shouted the celebratory Cossack salute — “Lyubo!”

For the past two weeks, the Cossacks — a caste of warriors
who have guarded the borders of the Russian empire for centuries — have
played a key role in the Russian occupation of Crimea. They have manned
checkpoints on its highways, guarded the headquarters of its separatist
government, patrolled the streets with their ceremonial whips in hand
and are now helping build and defend fortifications
on the de facto Crimean border with Ukraine. Through it all, they have
had ample help from Russia’s professional and state-sponsored Cossack
forces, who have come by the thousands to defend what they see as
historically Russian lands.

“Cossacks have no borders,” said Nikolai Pervakov, the first
deputy commander of Russia’s Kuban Cossack legion, who is leading their
mission to Crimea from his usual base of operations in the southern
Russian city of Krasnodar. Appearing on the square alongside Cherkashin
on Monday, he told TIME that a few thousand of his men have come to
Crimea from Russia, all with the express approval of the Kremlin. After
inspecting the bedraggled ranks of his Crimean comrades, Pervakov gave a
short speech on their fraternal ties. “We are a united people, people
of the same faith, traditions, customs. Our lives are linked,” he told
them. “So we need to be like a clenched and monolithic fist. Only then
will we have victory.”

The links that bind Cossacks around the world can be mystifying
for outsiders and hard to pin down. They are largely Slavic but come
from many other ethnic groups as well, and they speak various languages.
Some are born Cossacks while others are initiated into their martial
traditions. Their zealous devotion to the Orthodox Christian religion
tends to unite them, although different Cossack groups follow different
denominations of that faith. Through history, they have rebelled against
the Russian empire and marched alongside its armies to fight common
enemies, including the Turks, the British and the Khans of Central Asia.
Conflicts and upheavals have scattered them for centuries around the
world, and there are vibrant communities of Cossacks as far afield as
New Jersey, where their ancestors wound up after the Bolshevik
Revolution of 1917 tried to purge them from the Soviet Union. But what
unites the Cossacks in Crimea with their allies in Russia today is a
common belief that Moscow should command the Slavic world, most
crucially including eastern and southern Ukraine.

For the Cossacks of Crimea, that victory could mark a total
transformation. Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine’s
succession of leaders, regardless of whether they leaned toward Russia
or the West, have treated the local Crimean Cossacks with great
suspicion. Their commanders in Crimea have spread militant notions
of Slavic unity among their young cadets. All of that has attracted
scrutiny from Ukraine’s security services in recent years. Under the
rule of President Viktor Yanukovych, a Russia-leaning leader who was
deposed in a revolution last month, Crimea’s leading Cossacks were
investigated for training paramilitary groups and speaking out in
support of separatism, both of which are illegal in Ukraine. Some of
them have had their Cossack training camps raided by police in search of
weapons. Others have been deported to Russia on charges of inciting
ethnic hatred.

All of that stands in stark contrast to the lives of their fellow
Cossacks in Russia. In 2005, Putin signed a law called “On the State
Service of the Russian Cossacks,” which gave them the status of a
state-backed militia, complete with government paychecks. Under that
law, Putin, in his role as commander in chief, is the only one who can
assign someone the rank of Cossack general. Other officer ranks in the
Cossack hierarchy, which is distinct from the rest of the Russian
military’s pecking order, must be approved by the Kremlin Council for
Cossack Affairs. That law also granted
more than 600,000 officially registered Cossacks in Russia the rights
to fulfill various functions usually controlled by the state. This
includes the right to defend border regions, guard national forests,
organize military training for young cadets, fight terrorism, protect
local government buildings and administrative sites and provide the
vague service of “defending social order.”

It seemed to be in the latter capacity that they patrolled the
streets of Sochi during last month’s Winter Olympic Games, even greeting
arrivals in the airport terminal dressed in their signature lambskin
hats and knee-high leather boots. Vladimir Davydov, a local Cossack
officer and a member of the Sochi city council, saw the Games as a
historic chance to demonstrate the usefulness of Cossacks to the
Kremlin. “Our entire history we have served the sovereign, the
motherland,” he told TIME a few weeks before the Games began. “Now that
role is restored.” If the Kremlin calls on them, he said, the Cossacks
can field a force of 50,000 armed irregulars in the region surrounding
Sochi. “The Olympics will be our chance to prove our worth.”

Throughout the Games, they seemed to do that with flying colors,
though not without one appalling show of force. On Feb. 19, a few days
before the closing ceremony of the Games, a group of activists from the
protest group Pussy Riot tried to film an anti-Putin music video in
Sochi. But just as the young women pulled on their colorful balaclavas
and started dancing around, a group of uniformed Cossacks ran up to
them, sprayed them in the face with pepper spray, hit them with whips,
yanked them by the hair and dragged them away kicking and screaming.
Under current Ukrainian law, that kind of attack would have gotten the
Cossacks arrested for battery. In Russia, even during the Olympics, it
was part of their paid service to the state.

The allure of becoming a formally recognized militia force seems
to have made Crimea’s Cossacks even more gung ho about the Russian
annexation of their peninsula. “Our priority right now is to make sure
the referendum goes as planned,” Cherkashin told me on March 9, just
after he held a meeting with the new de facto leader of Crimea, the separatist prime minister Sergei Aksyonov.
Watching Russian state TV in a waiting area outside Aksyonov’s office
that afternoon, Cherkashin said Cossack volunteers from across Russia
and the former Soviet Union have been offering to come help Crimea break
away from Ukraine. “These two Cossacks in Armenia called me on Skype
the other day,” he said. “They held two Kalashnikovs in front of the
camera and said they’re ready to ride.”

But Cherkashin, who is also a member of the Crimean parliament,
has had to decline most of these offers. Flooding the peninsula with
various Cossack vigilantes would not be good for “keeping order,” he
said, and besides, they have enough support from Pervakov and the Kuban
Cossack legion as it is. After the morning lineup on the square in
Simferopol, the highest-ranking commanders walked over to a nearby
church — The Cathedral of Holy Mary Magdalene, Equal to the Apostles —
for a private powwow. It began with a blessing from a local priest of
the Russian Orthodox Church, Vitali Liskevich, who prayed for the Lord
to defend the righteous mission of the Cossacks in Crimea. After that,
Pervakov, the Cossack envoy from Russia, walked into the hall with a
sheaf of papers, and this reporter was asked to leave the room.

The
Russian Foreign Ministry says Russia is in broad agreement with China
on the situation in crisis-hit Ukraine. The ministry’s announcement
followed a telephone conversation between Russian Foreign Minister
Sergei Lavrov and his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi on Monday. “The
foreign ministers have exchanged their views on the situation in
Ukraine.

They
noted a broad overlap of the Russian and Chinese views on the current
situation in and around this country (Ukraine),” the Russian Foreign
Ministry said. In addition, the Russian ministry said the two ministers
pledged to continue close contacts on the issue. Meanwhile, UN
Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is expected to meet with Lavrov later in
the day on the sidelines of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva to
discuss the spiraling crisis in Ukraine. The developments come as seven
major industrialized countries denounced Russia’s military actions in
Ukraine’s semi-autonomous Republic of Crimea.

On
March 1, the upper house of the Russian parliament unanimously approved
a request by President Vladimir Putin to deploy troops into the Crimea
if necessary. The approval came after Crimea’s regional Prime Minister
Sergey Aksenov asked Putin to help restore peace and calm in the region
amid tensions over the region’s resistance against new pro-Western
authorities in Kiev. Russia has dispatched hundreds of its troops to
the Ukrainian territory of Crimea “to protect its interests and also of
those Russian speakers in that region.”

At first, Rustem Kadyrov could barely make out the mark outside his
house, in the Crimean town of Bakhchysarai, but it filled him with
terror. It was an X, cut deep into the gray metal of the gate, and its
significance cut even deeper, evoking a memory Kadyrov shares with all
Crimean Tatars. Kadyrov, who is thirty-one, grew up hearing stories
about marks on doors. In May of 1944, Stalin ordered his police to tag
the houses of Crimean Tatars, the native Muslim residents of the
peninsula. Within a matter of days, all of them—almost two hundred
thousand people—were evicted
from their homes, loaded onto trains, and sent to Central Asia, on the
pretext that the community had collaborated with the Nazi occupation of
Crimea.

Kadyrov’s grandmother, Sedeka Memetova, who was
eight at the time, was among those deported. “The soldiers gave us five
minutes to pack up,” she told me, when I visited the family on
Thursday. “We left everything behind.” Memetova still has vivid memories
of her journey into exile: the stench of the overcrowded train
carriage, the wailing of a pregnant woman who sat next to her, and the
solemn faces of the men who had to lower the bodies of their children
off of the moving train—the only way, she said, to dispose of the dead.
Four of her siblings were among the thousands of Crimean Tatars who
never even made it to their final destination, Uzbekistan.

Starting in the nineteen-sixties, the Soviet Union began to allow
survivors of the deportation to return. Memetova and her family came
back to Crimea almost three decades ago, in 1987. This weekend, at
around 3 P.M. on Saturday, Memetova’s forty-four-year-old
daughter, Ava, looked out the window and saw four young men, strangers
to the neighborhood, walking down the street, armed with batons. The men
were also carrying pieces of paper, Ava told me—which she believes were
lists of homes belonging to Crimean Tatars. Seventy years after
Memetova’s deportation, her house had been marked once again. “Just as
we thought we finally had a future,” she said. “How could anyone do this
in the twenty-first century?”

When I walked up Chiisty Istochniki Street from the Memetovas’ house, I
saw similar marks on four other houses, all of them residences of
Crimean Tatars, Kadyrov said. The houses of their Russian neighbors,
however, had not been touched. Similar markings have been reported in
other parts of Bakhchysarai, and in some areas of the regional capital,
Simferopol. Kadyrov told me that he called the police, who came out see
his gate, but they refused to register a case. He was not surprised.
“The police will not help us,” he said. “They told me Crimean Tatars are
not a priority for them. Of course not—they are punishing us because we
do not want Putin here.”

Kadyrov’s Russian neighbors have noticed the markings but dismissed his
worries. “Whoever did it was just joking,” one woman, who did not wish
to be named, told me. “We get along with our neighbors fine,” she
continued. “But it would be helpful if Crimean Tatars stopped supporting
Kiev.”

Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, claims that his country has an
obligation to protect the Crimean peninsula’s Russians, a majority of
its population, from what he called an “orgy of nationalists, and
extremists, and anti-Semites” rampaging through the streets of Kiev.
“What does that mean for us?” Kadyrov asked. “Who will protect us?”

Crimea is now firmly under the control of a new, pro-Moscow government,
which does not recognize the authority of the new administration in
Kiev. On Thursday, as the United States and European Union ramped up
pressure on the Kremlin—announcing sanctions and visa restrictions
against involved individuals—the regional parliament in Crimea voted
unanimously to declare the peninsula part of Russia. A previously
scheduled referendum on more autonomy for Crimea within Ukraine was
moved up from March 30th to March 16th, and changed to a question about
merging Crimea with Russia.

There are about three hundred thousand Crimean Tatars on the peninsula,
and although they constitute only fifteen per cent of its population
they have great political significance. If they do not back the upcoming
referendum, it will be far more difficult for the pro-Moscow government
in Crimea to legitimize what is in effect a Russian annexation of the
peninsula. This, Crimean Tatars told me, is precisely why pressure is
growing for them to turn their back on Kiev.

Over the past week, Moscow has sent a series of delegations to meet with
the leaders of the Crimean Tatar community. On Wednesday, the President
of Tatarstan, an autonomous Muslim republic in Russia, met with members
of the representative body of Crimean Tatars, known as the Mejlis.
Another member of his delegation, Ilshat Aminov—the head of Tatarstan’s
state broadcaster—paid a visit on the same day to the journalists at a
Crimean Tatar television channel, ATR, which has been openly supportive
of the new government in Kiev.

I happened to be at ATR when Aminov arrived. His laughter echoed through
the newsroom as he walked around, praising the station’s modern
equipment and avoiding any discussion of the news. When I asked Aminov
about the reason for his visit, he said, simply, “I am here to support
my brothers in a time of trouble.” Linur Yunusov, a senior journalist at
ATR, told me that while no Russian official had ever bothered to visit
Crimean Tatars before, Moscow was now sending one delegation after
another. “This sudden brotherly love is overwhelming,” he joked.

At one point, a journalist inside the newsroom called Aminov’s attention
to a television screen, which showed masked Russian soldiers blocking
the entrance to a military base outside Simferopol. “This is our live
position,” the journalist said, provocatively. “A perfect view of the
Russian occupation.” Aminov didn’t take the bait. “Which editing
software do you use?” he replied.

The delegates visiting from Russia have made many promises to the
Crimean Tatars to solicit their political support: seats in the new
government, financial assistance, official language rights, and
rural-development programs. These offers resonate, particularly as the
community feels that its plight has been largely ignored by the
government in Kiev for the past quarter century. Many Crimean Tatars
remain bitterly disappointed that Kiev has not delivered on its many
promises to pass laws that would recognize victims of Stalin’s
deportation or establish Crimean Tatar-language schools.

“We are on a verge of losing our culture, our language, our identity,”
Yunusov, the senior journalist, told me. And yet, like most of the
Crimean Tatars I have interviewed, he believes that the community will
be safer if the peninsula remains part of Ukraine. “For us, a European
Ukraine is the only way of making sure that we survive as people,” he
said. “We need European laws to protect our identity. After what
happened in 1944, we can never trust the Russians.”

Eskandar Baiibov, a deputy in the Crimean Tatar Mejlis, told me firmly
that his community is unanimous in its backing for the government in
Kiev, and that Crimean Tatars would boycott
any referendum on joining Russia. But he is also terrified, he
admitted, of the price that they might have to pay for refusing to give
the Kremlin the support it wants.

“We are already seeing signs that they are trying to intimidate us, to
split us, to stir trouble,” Baiibov said. “Ukrainians are also
vulnerable, but at least they have Ukraine to go to. Where will we go?
Crimea is our only home.” After the regional parliament voted to merge
Crimea into Russia on Thursday, the chairman of the Mejlis, Refat
Chubarov, released a statement to the press, calling for the United
Nations to “immediately consider” sending a contingent of international
peacekeepers into Crimea, “in order to deëscalate the military conflict …
which can lead to mass casualties among the entire civilian population
of the peninsula.”

But the prospect of U.N. peacekeepers landing on the peninsula anytime
soon is less than slim. And so, as Crimea prepares for a referendum on
its future, its native people are preparing for the worst. In
Bakhchysarai, Ava’s husband has cut up metal rods and placed them
throughout the house so the family can use them to fight off any
possible intruders. The men of Chiisty Istochniki Street now take turns
patrolling the neighborhood at night, and Rustem Kadyrov has applied for
travel documents for his children.

“Many of us want to get wives and children out of here, to somewhere safe,” Kadyrov told me. The men, he said, will stay.

Serkan Sava's ancestors left Crimea in a mass exodus some 150 years ago,
after the Ottoman Empire staved off Russian pressure in the Crimean War
but could not reverse the slow tumble that would lead to its
dissolution after World War I. A century later, the 35-year-old IT consultant's grandparents, by then
rooted in the post-Ottoman Turkish Republic, would hear of Soviet
dictator Josef Stalin's deportation of hundreds of thousands of Crimean
Tatars to Central Asia, in 1944, that cost the lives of more than
100,000 people.This week, Sava stood under a steady rain at a protest of about 250
people -- mostly Turkish Crimean Tatars -- outside the Russian consulate
in Istanbul. Noting that Crimean Tatars "have bad memories" of life
under Moscow's thumb, Sava argued that Turkey should use its influence
to ensure that the Black Sea peninsula remains a part of Ukraine and is
not annexed by Russia.With Crimea now occupied by Russian forces, the peninsula's
Russian-majority parliament clamoring to join the Russian Federation,
and a referendum on the issue scheduled for March 16, Crimean Tatars are
fearful of what another chapter of life under Russian rule could mean.
But if the Crimean Tatar relationship with Russia is rife with tragedy,
the Turkish reaction to any potential conflict with Moscow is one of
trepidation. It recalls a past marked by a series of demoralizing
military defeats
and recognizes a present in which the country enjoys deep trade ties
with its Black Sea neighbor, on which it relies for half of its
natural-gas supplies."Russia is the only neighbor that Turkey really fears for historic and
contemporary reasons," says Soner Cagaptay, author of "The Rise Of
Turkey: 21st Century's First Muslim Power" and director of the Turkish
program at the Washington Institute, a U.S.-based think tank.
"Historically, there's a deep-rooted fear among many Turks about not
waking up the Russian bear."The Crimean Tatars, an ethnic-Turkic people with millions of its
diaspora living inside Turkey, would appear to fit in with the role
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has carved out for himself.
Erdogan, the leader of the Islamist-rooted Justice and Development party
(AKP), has spent much political capital casting Ankara as a protector
of Muslims along its periphery. Erdogan was a harsh critic of the
overthrow of Muslim Brotherhood leader and Egyptian President Muhammad
Morsi, and was one of the first world leaders to call for military
intervention in Syria against the regime of Bashar al-Assad in the Arab
Spring uprising.Amid the recent political upheaval in Ukraine, Ahmet Davutoglu, Turkey's
foreign minister, was the first envoy to meet with Ukraine's new
government in Kyiv, following months of protests that led to the ouster
of the country's pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych. With an eye
on the past, Erdogan himself has promised not to "leave Crimean Tatars
in the lurch." But Erdogan, who has appeared at times to relish conflict
with other
world leaders, has carefully nurtured his relationship with Russian
President Vladimir Putin and appears unlikely to stake out a position
that would put Ankara-Moscow ties at serious risk."If you look at Erdogan's mercurial political style, he has pretty much
yelled at every and any head of government he has dealt with with the
exception of the Russian and the Iranian president," Cagaptay says, "not
because he likes them necessarily but because Turkey gets about
three-quarters of its gas and oil from Iran and Russia."Ottoman-Russian history is also a factor, says Cagaptay, who wrote in a
recent paper that, over a period of almost 400 years, the Ottoman Empire
fought in at least 17 wars with Russia and lost all of them. Further
complicating matters is that the 1936 Montreaux treaty, which
gives Turkey control over the straits that link the Black Sea to the
Mediterranean, also limits the weight of warships that would be allowed
to pass through from states not located on the Black Sea.

Any adaptation of this restriction by Turkey in favor of its NATO partners would put the treaty at risk. But as Celal Icten, the president of the Istanbul branch of Turkey's
Crimea Tatar Association, points out, it may be that the current
domestic political climate provides the main hindrance to a greater role
by Ankara in helping resolve the crisis in Ukraine.

Erdogan,
who has been embroiled in a months-long corruption scandal, is
fighting for his political career, and municipal elections at the end of
March are seen as a barometer of the remaining strength of his ruling
Justice and Development Party (AKP). Icten says Erdogan and President
Abdullah Gul are doing all they can, given the circumstances.

"Turkey's current political climate is hectic and that's why the
president and prime minister's support for Crimean Tatars gets lost
among other things on the political agenda," Icten says. "But [they've]
given support to Crimean Tatars and continue cooperation with Western
powers in Europe."

Cagaptay
agrees that Ankara will cooperate with Europe, which has
proposed limited sanctions, but is unlikely to take a leading role
unless serious violence is inflicted on the Crimean Tatar population.
That might not assuage Crimean Tatars like Sava, who say the protection
of a Turkic minority that is under threat should outweigh any political
concerns.

While Moscow refuses to recognize Ukraine's new government because it is
led by "fascists" who pose a threat to ethnic Russians, Tatars in
Crimea -- some of whose homes have reportedly been marked with an
ominous "X"-- say they are being singled out by Russian "self-defense"
brigades. At the Istanbul demonstration, protesters chanted, "Turkey, help your
brothers!" and, "We are shoulder-to-shoulder against the enemy!"

Erugrul Toksoy, a 47-year-old account manager sporting a blue scarf with
the Crimean Tatar insignia, says Erdogan "has done nothing" to help
Crimean Tatars, who make up 12 percent of the peninsula's population.

Sava,
the IT consultant, riffing on a quote from the late British
statesman Winston Churchill about the dangers of appeasement, warns that
waiting for action will have its own costs. "The one who tries to
protect the current state [of affairs] is hopeful that the crocodile
will eat him last," Sava says.

Four days after Crimean Tatars sent an SOS to Azerbaijani President
Ilham Aliyev, nothing has been heard from Baku but silence. For all its
grievances with Moscow, chances are slim that Azerbaijan, the Tatars'
rich South-Caucasus cousin, will stick its neck out over Crimea.

But Crimean Tatar community leader Mustafa Dzhemilyev, a Ukrainian
parliamentarian, gave it his best shot in a March 6 interview with the
news site Haqqin. “Do not leave your Crimean brothers and sisters at this difficult time,” Dzhemilyev implored Aliyev.

Recalling repressions by Tsarist and Soviet Russia, he underlined
that the Tatars will never put up with a Russian takeover of the Crimean
peninsula, and asked Aliyev to use his influence with Russian President
Vladimir Putin to prevent such an event.

The request was cc-ed to Turkish President Abdullah Gül and another Turkic leader, Kazakhstani President Nursultan Nazarbayev. Turkey has so far weighed in the strongest on the issue, while Aliyev and Nazarbayev have been slow to provide even a non-binding, thinking-of-you response.

Azerbaijani officials routinely emphasize Azerbaijan's emergence as a
regional power, but don’t expect Aliyev to snap his fingers in Putin’s
face over Crimea. Through its economic and political involvement in the
region and its many conflicts, Nagorno-Karabakh included, Russia could
hurt Azerbaijan.

But not everyone in Azerbaijan is willing to sit back. On March 9, two senior members of Azerbaijan’s opposition Musavat Party, Arif Gadjily and Gulaga Aslanly,
were detained in Makhachkala, in Russia's North Caucasus, while
traveling by train to Ukraine. The party has been outspokenly critical
of Russia's Ukraine policy, and, apparently, somebody had an eye out for
any whistle-stop tours to Kyiv. Local police on March 10 claimed that
the two were sent back home, APA reported.

Who lost in Crimea? If there is a country to be added to Ukraine, it's Turkey

The referendum decision of Crimea to return to the Russian fold,
after Turkey lost it to the Russian Empire with the 1774 Treaty of Kucuk
Kaynarcam, has spoiled Turkey’s strategic ambitions for the region.
What kind of ambitions? Nothing to do with recovering Crimea
geographically, but to bring back to life cultural and historical
heritage of the Crimean Tatar Khanate.

Even the burial of writer Cengiz Dagci, who died in London in 2011, back home in Crimea was a mission of strategic significance for Turkey. The Cooperation and Coordination Agency of Turkey (TIKA), by restoring the historic relics of Zincirli Madrassa and Haci Gray Inn and by renovating Kirim Tatar National School, tried to make the legacy of the Muslim Tatars more visible. In an action plan Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu
had prepared in 2002 while he was the chief adviser to the prime
minister, Ukraine was among the countries to develop strategic relations
with, alongside South Korea, Brazil and South Africa. Ankara tried to
develop its ties to Crimea with the consent of Ukrainians. This policy
did not change during the reign of the toppled leader Viktor Yanukovich.

Territorial integrity: a boomerang

Since the collapse of the USSR, Turkey has preferred to see the
future of Crimean Tatars within the territorial integrity of Ukraine.
When in 2008 Russian leader Vladimir V. Putin declared that unilateral
recognition of Kosovo without a UN decision would set a precedent, it
was not hard to predict that this was a Slavic vow of revenge. The turf
for this revenge was inevitably to be the historical friction points
between the Russians and the Turks. After the United States declared its
recognition of Kosovo, the first diplomat to submit his letter of
accreditation to the prime minister of Kosovo was the representative of Turkey. How do you think Putin considers Turkey’s objections to his decisions about Crimea?

Limited options

So what can Turkey do more than its US and EU allies against the
secession of Ukraine? Can Ankara decide on sanctions like the United
States and EU? Davutoglu, as the first foreign minister to go to Kiev
immediately after the crisis broke out, had meetings with Mustafa
Abduljamil, the leader of Crimean Tatar National Movement and the new Ukrainian government. In addition to moves on international platforms, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke with Putin and Davutoglu spoke with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to emphasize the need to find a solution
to the crisis within the territorial integrity of Ukraine. But these
efforts did not change the course of events. Abduljamil, the former
speaker of the Crimean Tatar National Assembly, the civil society
organization of the Tatars, met with Erdogan in Izmir on March 16 and
with Davutoglu in Ankara on March 17. Davutoglu said the results of the
referendum will not be accepted, that Ankara will continue to support the Crimean Tatars, and Turkey’s position on seeking a diplomatic solution stands.

Despite the resolute position expressed in our statements, the
general impression is this: Turkey is not in a position to reverse the
process of Crimea joining Russia. It is not even in a position to adopt
sanctions similar to those taken by the United States and EU. That is
why even if Turkey talks of initiatives in the UN, NATO and OESC it has
no option but to live with the situation. A diplomatic source asked by Al-Monitor,
“What options does Turkey have? Does it have a road map?” responded:
“We want a solution through diplomatic means but it is not realistic to
talk of a road map. Turkey has adopted a course many other countries
have chosen.” Asked if Turkey could resort to sanctions like the United
States and EU, the source said; “We don’t know what sanctions are on the
table at the moment. We can’t forecast what will happen in the long
run. The government has to make an assessment.”

Actually, it might be more realistic to talk of a reaction that has
been reduced to “diplomatic activity” that has no deterrent effects and
that won’t influence the outcome.

Russians gave what Turkey wanted

Because of dearth of options, the focus has shifted from blocking the
Russian designs for Crimea to protection of Tatars of Crimea. Russia,
aware of the question of legitimacy that would arise unless there is the
consent of Tatars, offered them guarantees far beyond Turkey’s
expectations. Putin told Abduljamil, invited to Moscow, that he had
issued directives for the protection of Tatars.

Moreover, Russia prepared a package that encourages the Crimean
Tatars to return to their homeland and assuring their participation in
governing it. Turkey’s priority is the return to their homeland of the
Crimean Tatars exiled to Central Asia in 1944. Davutoglu noted: “In last
12 years, TIKA and Turkey entered the picture. For our brethren, we
built hundreds of tenements, even bought houses from them. Today, the
Tatar population in Crimea is slightly above 300,000. This is all
because of Turkey’s support.”

The decisions of the Crimean Parliament also were promising. It decided: “Tatars exiled in 1944
will be encouraged to return. Legal, material and property problems of
the returnees will be solved. They will be offered financial assistance
for five years. Primary, second and higher schools in the Tatar language
will be opened. Historical and cultural relics will be restored. Tatar
publications will be encouraged.” This decree also gave official status
to Tatar language. Crimean Tatar National Assembly was given legal
recognition. They were offered 20% representation in the national
parliament. These were all rights Tatars could not obtain from the
Ukrainian government. The only anxiety Turkey or Crimeans might express
would to be say, “These promises can remain on paper.” But autonomy
practices of Russia since the end of the Soviet era shows that at least
when it comes to preservation of people’s language and cultures they
have not a bad record.

Chechnization syndrome

Another scenario that concerns Turkey closely is the possibility of a
Chechnization syndrome that could develop as a reaction to attaching
the peninsula to Russia. Tatars with their historical animosity to
Russia are between a rock and a hard place. There is talk of a jihadist
threat after Russian annexation. Abduljamil, who had been spearheading
the survival struggle of his people since the 1944 deportations, spoke
of this potential danger:
“We have among us Salafists, Wahhabis and organizations that fought in
Syria. They tell me that the enemy is now on their land and that they
are ready to confront them. We can’t stop those who want die in
dignity.”

In addition to threats emanating from Takfir and Hijret Salafi
organizations whose existence have been felt in Crimea in recent years,
there is also the potential of global jihadist network concentrating in
Syria to open an anti-Russia front in Crimea. Tatars who had gone to
Syria to fight had first attracted attention on April 25, 2013, when a
militant code-named Abu Khalid staged a suicide attack
from the ranks of Muhajiroun and Ansar groups. Growing Islamic
militancy in Ukraine first hit the agenda when seven militants were
apprehended with their weapons. The Ukrainian Interior Ministry said
that the apprehended militants were linked to Takfir and Hijret and
Hizb-ut Tahrir and were planning to assassinate Abduljamil.

The desire of those fighting against Moscow-supported regime in Syria
to settle accounts with Russia in Crimea scares Tatars who, like
Abduljamil, prefer nonviolent resistance. A representative from the
Tatar Crimean National Assembly said in our private chat: “Yes, there
are Tatars fighting in Syria and they might come back. We are worried.”

The Tatars know only too well that provocation,
whether from Ukranian radical nationalists or nationalist Russians or a
Chechnization scenario originating from Islamist Tatars who want to
open a jihadist front, will bring to them only a new exile or genocide.

The loss of Russia’s most important military base in the Black Sea basin
– the Sevastopol base in Crimea – will shift the balance in Turkey’s
favor, which may become the only strong power in the area, says Zorakn
Foundation board trustee Karen Vrtanesyan. This circumstance might cause
more challenges for Armenia, which has an unresolved military conflict
with Azerbaijan, should tensions escalate between the two countries.

The representative of Zorakn foundation, involved in raising public
awareness on army, military and strategic-political issues, views
Russia’s behavior in relation to the Autonomous Republic of Crimea in
Ukraine as natural. “The fact that Russia is trying to preserve its
active presence in the Black Sea and that its primary target is Crimea
stems from the overall geopolitical situation.”

Vrtanesyan points out also that in the Black Sea basin Russia’s position against Turkey is not that strong.

“Today the military balance between Russia and Turkey in the Black Sea
is frail as it is, and I wouldn’t say Russia has any advantages, quite
the opposite, the Turkish fleet is much better equipped excelling that
of Russia by some criteria, for example, Turkey has 14 submarines, while
Russia has two, one of them non-functional,” says Vrtanesyan.

Since late last week Moscow established de-facto military control over
Crimea, an autonomous republic in the south of Ukraine with a
predominantly ethnic Russian population. The Russian parliament has also
empowered President Vladimir Putin to use troops to defend the ethnic
Russian and Russian-speaking population elsewhere in the territory of
Ukraine. Moscow says it is reacting to the formation of an
ultranationalist government in Kiev that threatens the country’s
Russian-speaking minority. Meanwhile, the United States and the European
Union have condemned Russia’s aggressive designs, threatening economic
sanctions against Moscow.

The biggest ethnic community of the peninsula with more that 2 million
population is Russian, followed by the Ukrainian – 24 percent, and
Muslim Tatars – 12 percent; about 0.5 percent of the population is
Armenian who have declared a neutral position in the conflict supporting
neither Russians, nor Ukrainians nor Tatars.

“I wouldn’t say Russia’s position in the Black Sea is too strong, and
Crimea’s loss would aggravate the situation, which can become a problem
for us. Of course, not in non-combat conditions, but if the
Armenian-Azeri conflict gets more tense, there might be issues in terms
of supplies to the Georgian ports – Turkey can effortlessly place ships
there, inspect ours and turn them back/deny passage,” says Vrtanesyan.

Expert in Turkish studies Gevorg Petrosyan, editor of razm.info website,
reminds that Turkey and Russia have been fighting for Crimea for ages,
because of the peninsula’s strategic geopolitical position. Petrosyan
says Turkey’s claims for Crimea should be viewed as quite feasible.

“The geopolitical situation is changing so rapidly that it cannot be
ruled out, considering the fact that Turkey is one of the two major
players in the Black Sea, the withdrawal of Russian forces from Crimea
is absolutely in Turkey’s interest,” says the expert.

Armenia has backed Crimea’s choice of joining Russia, supporting the
right to self-determination for the peninsula’s population. In response,
Ukraine has recalled its ambassador to Armenia."Armenia's principled position on the right to
self-determination remains unchanged and has been repeatedly
expressed over the years," Armenia's deputy foreign
minister, Shavarsh Kocharyan, told Ukrainian Ambassador Ivan
Kukhta, as quoted by the Armenian Foreign Ministry's press
service.

The meeting, which took place in Armenia’s capital of Yerevan,
was initiated by the Ukrainian side after Armenia’s President
Serzh Sargsyan expressed support for the Crimean referendum,
stating it was justified. Sargsyan told his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in a phone
conversation that the Crimean referendum was a “model for the
realization of self-determination.”

In response, Ukraine recalled its ambassador to Yerevan for
consultation on Friday. Kiev also summoned Armenia’s ambassador to Ukraine, Andranik
Manukyan, to express its concerns over Armenia’s position on the
referendum. On Sunday, over 96 percent of voters taking part in the Crimean
referendum answered “yes” to the autonomous republic joining
Russia. The Crimean parliament also unanimously voted to
integrate the region into Russia.

On Friday, Russia finalized the legal process of taking Crimea
under its sovereignty, as President Putin signed a law amending
the Russian constitution to reflect the transition. Earlier, Russian lawmakers ratified both the amendment and an
international treaty with Crimea and the city of Sevastopol,
which was legally required for the incorporation. The move has been met with an onslaught of international
sanctions against Russia for its role in the Ukraine crisis.

Armenia has a strong stance of supporting self-determination.

During the confrontation over Nagorno-Karabakh, which broke out
in 1988, the region – mostly populated by Armenians – sought
independence from Azerbaijan and announced its intention to join
Armenia. In 1991, the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic was founded.
Azerbaijan tried to regain control over the territory, and the
conflict escalated into a full-scale war which claimed the lives
of around 30,000 people. The conflict ended in 1994, with
Nagorno-Karabakh’s independence remaining unrecognized and the
region remaining a part of Azerbaijan, according to Baku’s
legislation. Yerevan has been supporting the Nagorno-Karabakh
region, representing its interests in an official capacity.

Since 1994, talks to determine the status of the disputed region
have been conducted within the framework of the Minsk Group of
the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).
The group proposed the basic principles for a settlement of the
conflict – known as the Madrid document – in 2007.

The US policy on Armenia has resulted in a break-up of Armenia's once powerful light industry, in lopsided reforms and the ensuing economic and social problems. According to experts, the US long-term plans to make Armenia distance itself from Russia are hardly feasible today, just as they were unfeasible 20 years ago. Americans have to take into account the historical and political realities of the region.

The US has never cherished illusions about the post-Soviet Armenia. Washington has conversely been and will remain suspicious of Yerevan, for Armenia is Russia's strategic partner, a member state of the Collective Security Treaty Organization and has friendly relations with Iran despite the geographical and geopolitical realities. And yet, the US seeks to play an active role in the Trans-Caucasus. The US has for example tried to ensure that Armenia and Turkey will open their border, one that's been closed since 1993 at the insistence of Ankara. The US thus sought to bolster its ally Turkey's position in the region. But the diplomatic effort of 2010 yielded no specific result. The US plan failed. This is what Director of the Institute for Caucasus Studies, political analyst Alexander Iskandaryan, says about it in a comment.

"The US has clearly miscalculated. The moment the Armenian-Turkish factor became a factor in Turkey's home policy, the US pressure proved insufficient. There is a world of a difference between pressurizing Turkey in Zurich and doing the same thing in Ankara. Besides, the US badly needs Turkey; it needs the crazy house that's emerged in the Middle East in recent years. Ankara is perfectly aware of that. So, it was the US miscalculation and also the drastically changed situation, I mean the Arab Spring, etc. In short, the US efforts failed".

Yet another factor in the US attempted boosting of influence on Armenia over the past 20 years have been all sorts of grant programmes, the loan financing of government and central bank programmes, and also support for numerous nongovernmental public organizations that have initiated most protest actions in Armenia. According to experts and analysts, the US is thus trying to create financial dependence and pro-western sentiment of the local elite. But according to an Armenian political analyst and spin doctor Vigen Akopyan, the Americans failed to ensure an alternative to Russia in such important areas as military and economic security.

"Security is of paramount importance to Armenia. If Armenia has strong armed forces, it will be able to settle the issue of Nagorno-Karabakh, and will also manage to settle economic problems. Transfers are also very important. A transfer is Armenia's second budget. Some 2.5 billion dollars are transferred to Armenia officially every year. Russia accounts for some 86% of that amount. Americans have failed to offer alternatives to these important factors".

Experts also point out that the US has never tried to stage a coup in Armenia, like the one in Georgia, because of Armenia's obvious orientation towards Russia. An increasingly great number of experts agree that to weaken Russia's influence on the region will soon become next to impossible, given Armenia's forthcoming joining of the Customs Union.

“Buoyed
by the continued support from the US and Europe, these fanatics
represent a more serious threat to democracy than Yanukovich and the
pro-Russian government ever could. The
violence on the streets of Ukraine is far more than an expression of
popular anger against a government. Instead, it is merely the latest
example of the rise of the most insidious form of fascism that Europe
has seen since the fall of the Third Reich.Recent
months have seen regular protests by the Ukrainian political opposition
and its supporters – protests ostensibly in response to Ukrainian
President Yanukovich’s refusal to sign a trade agreement with the
European Union that was seen by many political observers as the first
step towards European integration. The protests remained largely
peaceful until January 17th when protesters armed with clubs, helmets,
and improvised bombs unleashed brutal violence on the police, storming
government buildings, beating anyone suspected of pro-government
sympathies, and generally wreaking havoc on the streets of Kiev. But
who are these violent extremists and what is their ideology?The
political formation is known as “Pravy Sektor” (Right Sector), which is
essentially an umbrella organization for a number of ultra-nationalist
(read fascist) right wing groups including supporters of the “Svoboda”
(Freedom) Party, “Patriots of Ukraine”, “Ukrainian National Assembly –
Ukrainian National Self Defense” (UNA-UNSO), and “Trizub”. All of these
organizations share a common ideology that is vehemently anti-Russian,
anti-immigrant, and anti-Jewish among other things. In addition they
share a common reverence for the so called “Organization of Ukrainian
Nationalists” led by Stepan Bandera, the infamous Nazi collaborators who
actively fought against the Soviet Union and engaged in some of the
worst atrocities committed by any side in World War II.While
Ukrainian political forces, opposition and government, continue to
negotiate, a very different battle is being waged in the streets. Using
intimidation and brute force more typical of Hitler’s “Brownshirts” or
Mussolini’s “Blackshirts” than a contemporary political movement, these
groups have managed to turn a conflict over economic policy and the
political allegiances of the country into an existential struggle for
the very survival of the nation that these so called “nationalists”
claim to love so dearly. The images of Kiev burning, Lviv streets
filled with thugs, and other chilling examples of the chaos in the
country, illustrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that the political
negotiation with the Maidan (Kiev’s central square and center of the
protests) opposition is now no longer the central issue. Rather, it is
the question of Ukrainian fascism and whether it is to be supported or
rejected.For
its part, the United States has strongly come down on the side of the
opposition, regardless of its political character. In early December,
members of the US ruling establishment such as John McCain and Victoria
Nuland were seen at Maidan lending their support to the protesters.
However, as the character of the opposition has become apparent in
recent days, the US and Western ruling class and its media machine have
done little to condemn the fascist upsurge. Instead, their
representatives have met with representatives of Right Sector and deemed
them to be “no threat.” In other words, the US and its allies have
given their tacit approval for the continuation and proliferation of the
violence in the name of their ultimate goal: regime change.In
an attempt to pry Ukraine out of the Russian sphere of influence, the
US-EU-NATO alliance has, not for the first time, allied itself with
fascists. Of course, for decades, millions in Latin America were
disappeared or murdered by fascist paramilitary forces armed and
supported by the United States. The mujahideen of Afghanistan, which
later transmogrified into Al Qaeda, also extreme ideological
reactionaries, were created and financed by the United States for the
purposes of destabilizing Russia. And of course, there is the painful
reality of Libya and, most recently Syria, where the United States and
its allies finance and support extremist jihadis against a government
that has refused to align with the US and Israel. There is a disturbing
pattern here that has never been lost on keen political observers: the
United States always makes common cause with right wing extremists and
fascists for geopolitical gain.The
situation in Ukraine is deeply troubling because it represents a
political conflagration that could very easily tear the country apart
less than 25 years after it gained independence from the Soviet Union.
However, there is another equally disturbing aspect to the rise of
fascism in that country – it is not alone.The Fascist Menace Across the ContinetUkraine
and the rise of right wing extremism there cannot be seen, let alone
understood, in isolation. Rather, it must be examined as part of a
growing trend throughout Europe (and indeed the world) – a trend which
threatens the very foundations of democracy.

In
Greece, savage austerity imposed by the troika (IMF, ECB, and European
Commission) has crippled the country’s economy, leading to a depression
as bad, if not worse, than the Great Depression in the United States.
It is against this backdrop of economic collapse that the Golden Dawn
party has grown to become the third most popular political party in the
country. Espousing an ideology of hate, the Golden Dawn – in effect a
Nazi party that promotes anti-Jewish, anti-immigrant, anti-women
chauvinism – is a political force that the government in Athens has
understood to be a serious threat to the very fabric of society. It is
this threat which led the government to arrest the party’s leadership
after a Golden Dawn Nazi fatally stabbed an anti-fascist rapper. Athens
has launched an investigation into the party, though the results of
this investigation and trial remain somewhat unclear.What
makes Golden Dawn such an insidious threat is the fact that, despite
their central ideology of Nazism, their anti-EU, anti-austerity rhetoric
appeals to many in the economically devastated Greece. As with many
fascist movements in the 20th Century, Golden Dawn scapegoats
immigrants, Muslim and African primarily, for many of the problems
facing Greeks. In dire economic circumstances, such irrational hate
becomes appealing; an answer to the question of how to solve society’s
problems. Indeed, despite Golden Dawn’s leaders being jailed, other
party members are still in parliament, still running for major offices
including mayor of Athens. Though an electoral victory is unlikely,
another strong showing at the polls will make the eradication of fascism
in Greece that much harder.Were
this phenomenon confined to Greece and Ukraine, it would not constitute
a continental trend. Sadly however, we see the rise of similar, albeit
slightly less overtly fascist, political parties all over Europe. In
Spain, the ruling pro-austerity People’s Party has moved to establish
draconian laws restricting protest and free speech, and empowering and
sanctioning repressive police tactics. In France, the National Front
Party of Marine Le Pen, which vehemently scapegoats Muslim and African
immigrants, won nearly twenty percent of the vote in the first round of
presidential elections. Similarly, the Party for Freedom in the
Netherlands – which promotes anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant policies – has
grown to be the third largest in parliament. Throughout Scandinavia,
ultra nationalist parties which once toiled in complete irrelevance and
obscurity are now significant players in elections. These trends are
worrying to say the least.It
should be noted too that, beyond Europe, there are a number of
quasi-fascist political formations which are, in one way or another,
supported by the United States. The right wing coups that overthrew the
governments of Paraguay and Honduras were tacitly and/or overtly
supported by Washington in their seemingly endless quest to suppress the
Left in Latin America. Of course, one should also remember that the
protest movement in Russia was spearheaded by Alexei Navalny and his
nationalist followers who espouse a virulently anti-Muslim, racist
ideology that views immigrants from the Russian Caucasus and former
Soviet republics as beneath “European Russians”. These and other
examples begin to paint a very ugly portrait of a US foreign policy that
attempts to use economic hardship and political upheaval to extend US
hegemony around the world.In
Ukraine, the “Right Sector” has taken the fight from the negotiating
table to the streets in an attempt to fulfill the dream of Stepan
Bandera – a Ukraine free of Russia, Jews, and all other “undesirables”
as they see it. Buoyed by the continued support from the US and Europe,
these fanatics represent a more serious threat to democracy than
Yanukovich and the pro-Russian government ever could. If Europe and the
United States don’t recognize this threat in its infancy, by the time
they finally do, it might just be too late.

“Buoyed
by the continued support from the US and Europe, these fanatics
represent a more serious threat to democracy than Yanukovich and the
pro-Russian government ever could.”

The
violence on the streets of Ukraine is far more than an expression of
popular anger against a government. Instead, it is merely the latest
example of the rise of the most insidious form of fascism that Europe
has seen since the fall of the Third Reich.Recent months have seen regular
protests by the Ukrainian political opposition and its supporters –
protests ostensibly in response to Ukrainian President Yanukovich’s
refusal to sign a trade agreement with the European Union that was seen
by many political observers as the first step towards European
integration. The protests remained largely peaceful until January 17th
when protesters armed with clubs, helmets, and improvised bombs
unleashed brutal violence on the police, storming government buildings,
beating anyone suspected of pro-government sympathies, and generally
wreaking havoc on the streets of Kiev. But who are these violent
extremists and what is their ideology?The political formation is known as “Pravy Sektor”(Right
Sector), which is essentially an umbrella organization for a number of
ultra-nationalist (read fascist) right wing groups including supporters
of the “Svoboda” (Freedom) Party, “Patriots of Ukraine”, “Ukrainian
National Assembly – Ukrainian National Self Defense” (UNA-UNSO), and
“Trizub”. All of these organizations share a common ideology that is
vehemently anti-Russian, anti-immigrant, and anti-Jewish among other
things. In addition they share a common reverence for the so called
“Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists” led by Stepan Bandera, the
infamous Nazi collaborators who actively fought against the Soviet Union
and engaged in some of the worst atrocities committed by any side in
World War II.While Ukrainian political forces,
opposition and government, continue to negotiate, a very different
battle is being waged in the streets. Using intimidation and brute
force more typical of Hitler’s “Brownshirts” or Mussolini’s
“Blackshirts” than a contemporary political movement, these groups have
managed to turn a conflict over economic policy and the political
allegiances of the country into an existential struggle for the very
survival of the nation that these so called “nationalists” claim to love
so dearly. The images of Kiev burning, Lviv streets filled with thugs,
and other chilling examples of the chaos in the country, illustrate
beyond a shadow of a doubt that the political negotiation with the
Maidan (Kiev’s central square and center of the protests) opposition is
now no longer the central issue. Rather, it is the question of
Ukrainian fascism and whether it is to be supported or rejected.For its part, the United States has
strongly come down on the side of the opposition, regardless of its
political character. In early December, members of the US ruling
establishment such as John McCain and Victoria Nuland were seen at
Maidan lending their support to the protesters. However, as the
character of the opposition has become apparent in recent days, the US
and Western ruling class and its media machine have done little to
condemn the fascist upsurge. Instead, their representatives have met
with representatives of Right Sector and deemed them to be “no threat.”
In other words, the US and its allies have given their tacit approval
for the continuation and proliferation of the violence in the name of
their ultimate goal: regime change.In an attempt to pry Ukraine out of the
Russian sphere of influence, the US-EU-NATO alliance has, not for the
first time, allied itself with fascists. Of course, for decades,
millions in Latin America were disappeared or murdered by fascist
paramilitary forces armed and supported by the United States. The
mujahideen of Afghanistan, which later transmogrified into Al Qaeda,
also extreme ideological reactionaries, were created and financed by the
United States for the purposes of destabilizing Russia. And of course,
there is the painful reality of Libya and, most recently Syria, where
the United States and its allies finance and support extremist jihadis
against a government that has refused to align with the US and Israel.
There is a disturbing pattern here that has never been lost on keen
political observers: the United States always makes common cause with
right wing extremists and fascists for geopolitical gain. The situation in Ukraine is deeply
troubling because it represents a political conflagration that could
very easily tear the country apart less than 25 years after it gained
independence from the Soviet Union. However, there is another equally
disturbing aspect to the rise of fascism in that country – it is not
alone.The Fascist Menace Across the ContinentUkraine and the rise of right wing
extremism there cannot be seen, let alone understood, in isolation.
Rather, it must be examined as part of a growing trend throughout Europe
(and indeed the world) – a trend which threatens the very foundations
of democracy.In Greece, savage austerity imposed by
the troika (IMF, ECB, and European Commission) has crippled the
country’s economy, leading to a depression as bad, if not worse, than
the Great Depression in the United States. It is against this backdrop
of economic collapse that the Golden Dawn party has grown to become the
third most popular political party in the country. Espousing an
ideology of hate, the Golden Dawn – in effect a Nazi party that promotes
anti-Jewish, anti-immigrant, anti-women chauvinism – is a political
force that the government in Athens has understood to be a serious
threat to the very fabric of society. It is this threat which led the
government to arrest the party’s leadership after a Golden Dawn Nazi
fatally stabbed an anti-fascist rapper. Athens has launched an
investigation into the party, though the results of this investigation
and trial remain somewhat unclear.What makes Golden Dawn such an
insidious threat is the fact that, despite their central ideology of
Nazism, their anti-EU, anti-austerity rhetoric appeals to many in the
economically devastated Greece. As with many fascist movements in the
20th Century, Golden Dawn scapegoats immigrants, Muslim and
African primarily, for many of the problems facing Greeks. In dire
economic circumstances, such irrational hate becomes appealing; an
answer to the question of how to solve society’s problems. Indeed,
despite Golden Dawn’s leaders being jailed, other party members are
still in parliament, still running for major offices including mayor of
Athens. Though an electoral victory is unlikely, another strong showing
at the polls will make the eradication of fascism in Greece that much
harder.Were this phenomenon confined to Greece
and Ukraine, it would not constitute a continental trend. Sadly
however, we see the rise of similar, albeit slightly less overtly
fascist, political parties all over Europe. In Spain, the ruling
pro-austerity People’s Party has moved to establish draconian laws
restricting protest and free speech, and empowering and sanctioning
repressive police tactics. In France, the National Front Party of
Marine Le Pen, which vehemently scapegoats Muslim and African
immigrants, won nearly twenty percent of the vote in the first round of
presidential elections. Similarly, the Party for Freedom in the
Netherlands – which promotes anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant policies – has
grown to be the third largest in parliament. Throughout Scandinavia,
ultra nationalist parties which once toiled in complete irrelevance and
obscurity are now significant players in elections. These trends are
worrying to say the least.It should be noted too that, beyond
Europe, there are a number of quasi-fascist political formations which
are, in one way or another, supported by the United States. The right
wing coups that overthrew the governments of Paraguay and Honduras were
tacitly and/or overtly supported by Washington in their seemingly
endless quest to suppress the Left in Latin America. Of course, one
should also remember that the protest movement in Russia was spearheaded
by Alexei Navalny and his nationalist followers who espouse a
virulently anti-Muslim, racist ideology that views immigrants from the
Russian Caucasus and former Soviet republics as beneath “European
Russians”. These and other examples begin to paint a very ugly portrait
of a US foreign policy that attempts to use economic hardship and
political upheaval to extend US hegemony around the world.In Ukraine, the “Right Sector” has
taken the fight from the negotiating table to the streets in an attempt
to fulfill the dream of Stepan Bandera – a Ukraine free of Russia, Jews,
and all other “undesirables” as they see it. Buoyed by the continued
support from the US and Europe, these fanatics represent a more serious
threat to democracy than Yanukovich and the pro-Russian government ever
could. If Europe and the United States don’t recognize this threat in
its infancy, by the time they finally do, it might just be too late. - See more at: http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2014/01/30/ukraine-and-the-rebirth-of-fascism-in-europe/#sthash.51fGPo5d.dpufSource:http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2014/01/30/ukraine-and-the-rebirth-of-fascism-in-europe/Source:http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2014/01/30/ukraine-and-the-rebirth-of-fascism-in-europe/

With the eyes of the
world fixed on Russia’s invasion of Crimea
and the prospect of a wider war engulfing all Ukraine, our attention
has been diverted from what may be the most significant aspect of this
crisis: the ascension of a genuinely fascist mass movement into the corridors of power.

Our "mainstream" media shrugs off what it describes as the presence of "a few ultra-nationalists" at the Kiev protests, but this is nonsense: it is far more than a few. Indeed, the activists of the two main fascist parties in Ukraine – Svoboda and "Right Sector" – provided the muscle the insurrectionists needed to take over government buildings in Kiev and across western Ukraine.

Svoboda ("Freedom") was founded in 1991 as the Social National Party
of Ukraine. The party idolizes Stepan Bandera, whose followers fought on the side of the Nazis
during World War II against the Red Army and Ukrainian communist
militias. Bandera’s Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) had
direct support from the Germans: Hitler wanted them to police Ukraine
after the Germans took it, and the OUN organized volunteer militias that
actively participated in the Holocaust. "The Jews of the Soviet
Union," declared the Banderists, "are the most loyal supporters of the
Bolshevik Regime and the vanguard of Muscovite imperialism in the
Ukraine." When the Germans took Lvov in the summer of 1941, the
Banderists sent a message to Lvov’s Jews in the form of a pamphlet which
said: "We will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet"! Which they did; the
OUN worked with the SS to round up and slaughter 4,000 of the city’s
Jews. Their weapons of choice: everything from guns to metal poles.

When Viktor Yushchenko, during his disastrous tenure as President of Ukraine,
bestowed on Bandera the posthumous title of "Hero of Ukraine," the
European Parliament formally protested: they were ignored.

Svoboda leader Oleh Tyahnybok, now a top official
of the Ukrainian Parliament, is an unrepentant anti-Semite. In the
summer of 2004, he made a speech to his followers at the gravesite of a
Banderist commander in which he declared: "You are the ones that the Moscow-Jewish mafia ruling Ukraine fears most." His peroration also made reference to "Kikes"
as prominent among those the Banderists fought. Tyahnybok was expelled
from Parliament for his remarks, but the "revolution" has installed him
back in his seat – and more powerful than ever.

He has plenty of company. Svoboda activists, who already held seats in Parliament, hold no less than eight top Cabinet positions:

Ihor Tenyukh
– interim defense
minister and a member of Svoboda’s political council. Formerly commander
of Ukraine’s navy, in 2008, during Russia’s war with Georgia, he ordered
Ukrainian warships to block the entrance of the Russian Navy to the bay
of Sevastopol.

Andriy Parubiy – National Security Council chief, co-founded
Svoboda back when it was the “Social National” (ahem!) party.

Dmytro Yarosh – deputy head of the National Security Council, i.e.
the police, and the founder-leader of "Right Sector," a militant
neo-Nazi paramilitary group that took charge of security in the Maiden.

Serhiy Kvit – a leading member of Svoboda, is to head up the Education
Ministry.

Andriy Moknyk – the new Minister of Ecology, has been Svoboda’s
envoy to other European fascist parties. Last year, he met
with representatives of Italy’s violent neo-fascist gang, Forza Nuovo.

Ihor Shvaika – agro-oligarch and a member of Svoboda, has been appointed
Minister of Agriculture. One of the richest men in the country, his massive
investments in agriculture would seem to indicate a slight conflict of interest.

For the first time since 1933, the followers of a movement that valorizes Adolf
Hitler and preaches anti-Semitism has entered a European government. The German
Nazis, too, were part of a "coalition" government, the other members
of which thought
they could contain or even “tame” them and prevent a Communist takeover. They
were tragically wrong – and the United States and its European allies are taking
the same road in backing Hitler’s heirs in Ukraine.

Of course the majority of the government’s supporters are hardly
hardcore neo-Nazis: but that isn’t necessary to make this a precedent
the West will live to regret. The presence of Svoboda and "Right Sector"
legitimizes these movements, and not only in Ukraine. Germany has periodically sought to ban the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party, and the British have taken legal measures
against the British National Party: will they now grant the Ukrainian
brothers of these so-called hate groups diplomatic recognition and
pledges of political and even military support?

What’s interesting about the specific appointments listed above is the prominence of "Right Sector" leader Dmytro Yarosh
in the key position of deputy chief of the national police. The "Right
Sector" organization came out of the merger of several ultra-nationalist
and openly neo-Nazi grouplets, including "Trident," the Ukrainian
National Assembly-Ukrainian National Defense Force, "White Hammer," and
"Patriots of Ukraine." Yorash boasted
at the height of the protests that his group had amassed a large
weapons cache, and since they already had the guns it was inevitable
they would form the nucleus of the reconstituted police force. With the
group’s high profile, and its celebrated status as "heroes of the
revolution," Yorash’s stormtroopers – who wear the red-and-black
insignia of the Banderists –will be charged with suppressing
anti-government "disturbances" and hunting down "traitors." Perhaps
they’ll throw in a little queer-bashing as well: the nationalists hate gays as well as Jews and all Russian-speakers.

Victoria Nuland thought she could keep Svoboda and "Right Sector" out
of the government, but she hasn’t done a very good job so far. And with
elections scheduled for May 5, the nationalists are well positioned to
take a good chunk of the vote. Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the State Department’s
favored candidate, is a bespectacled technocrat notably lacking in the
charisma department. Tyahnybok , on the other hand, is a natural demagogue.

No matter how many US taxpayer dollars flow into the coffers of the State Department’s
Ukrainian sock puppets between now and May 25, all the money in the world may
not be able to contain the forces our interventionists have loosened on the
world. The news that the leader of "Right Sector" has called on none
other than al-Qaeda to help Ukraine in its battle against Russia is an indication
of just what sort of demons we have unleashed – this time.

According to a report in Kommersant-Ukraine, the finance ministry of
Washington’s stooges in Kiev who are pretending to be a government has
prepared an economic austerity plan that will cut Ukrainian pensions
from $160 to $80 so that Western bankers who lent money to Ukraine can
be repaid at the expense of Ukraine’s poor. http://www.kommersant.ua/doc/2424454 It is Greece all over again.

Before anything approaching stability and legitimacy has been
obtained for the puppet government put in power by the Washington
orchestrated coup against the legitimate, elected Ukraine government,
the Western looters are already at work. Naive protesters who believed
the propaganda that EU membership offered a better life are due to lose
half of their pension by April. But this is only the beginning.

The corrupt Western media describes loans as “aid.” However, the 11
billion euros that the EU is offering Kiev is not aid. It is a loan.
Moreover, it comes with many strings, including Kiev’s acceptance of an
IMF austerity plan.

Remember now, gullible Ukrainians participated in the protests that
were used to overthrow their elected government, because they believed
the lies told to them by Washington-financed NGOs that once they joined
the EU they would have streets paved with gold. Instead they are getting
cuts in their pensions and an IMF austerity plan.

The austerity plan will cut social services, funds for education,
layoff government workers, devalue the currency, thus raising the prices
of imports which include Russian gas, thus electricity, and open
Ukrainian assets to takeover by Western corporations.
Ukraine’s agriculture lands will pass into the hands of American
agribusiness. One part of the Washington/EU plan for Ukraine, or that
part of
Ukraine that doesn’t defect to Russia, has succeeded. What remains of
the country will be thoroughly looted by the West.

The other part hasn’t worked as well. Washington’s Ukrainian stooges
lost control of the protests to organized and armed ultra-nationalists.
These groups, whose roots go back to those who fought for Hitler during
World War 2, engaged in words and deeds that sent southern and eastern
Ukraine clamoring to be returned to Russia where they resided prior to
the 1950s when the Soviet communist party stuck them into Ukraine.

At this time of writing it looks like Crimea has seceded from
Ukraine. Washington and its NATO puppets can do nothing but bluster and
threaten sanctions. The White House Fool has demonstrated the impotence
of the “US sole superpower” by issuing sanctions against unknown
persons, whoever they are, responsible for returning Crimea to Russia,
where it existed for about 200 years before, according to Solzhenitsyn, a
drunk Khrushchev of Ukrainian ethnicity moved southern and eastern
Russian provinces into Ukraine. Having observed the events in western
Ukraine, those Russian provinces want to go back home where they belong,
just as South Ossetia wanted nothing to do with Georgia.

Washington’s stooges in Kiev can do nothing about Crimea except
bluster. Under the Russian-Ukraine agreement, Russia is permitted 25,000
troops in Crimea. The US/EU media’s deploring of a “Russian invasion of
16,000 troops” is either total ignorance or complicity in Washington’s
lies. Obviously, the US/EU media is corrupt. Only a fool would rely on
their reports. Any media that would believe anything Washington says
after George W. Bush and Dick Cheney sent Secretary of State Colin
Powell to the UN to peddle the regime’s lies about “Iraqi weapons of
mass destruction,” which the weapons inspectors had told the White House
did not exist, is clearly a collection of bought-and-paid for whores.

In the former Russian provinces of eastern Ukraine, Putin’s low-key
approach to the strategic threat that Washington has brought to Russia
has given Washington a chance to hold on to a major industrial complex
that serves the Russian economy and military. The people themselves in
eastern Ukraine are in the streets demanding separation from the
unelected government that Washington’s coup has imposed in Kiev.
Washington, realizing that its incompetence has lost Crimea, had its
Kiev stooges appoint Ukrainian oligarchs, against whom the Maiden
protests were partly directed, to governing positions in eastern Ukraine
cities. These oligarchs have their own private militias in addition to
the police and any Ukrainian military units that are still functioning.
The leaders of the protesting Russians are being arrested and
disappeared. Washington and its EU puppets, who proclaim their support
for self-determination, are only for self-determination when it can be
orchestrated in their favor. Therefore, Washington is busy at work
suppressing self-determination in eastern Ukraine.

This is a dilemma for Putin. His low-key approach has allowed
Washington to seize the initiative in eastern Ukraine. The oligarchs
Taruta and Kolomoyskiy have been put in power in Donetsk and
Dnipropetrovsk, and are carrying out arrests of Russians and committing
unspeakable crimes, but you will never hear of it from the US
presstitutes. Washington’s strategy is to arrest and deep-six the
leaders of the secessionists so that there no authorities to request
Putin’s intervention.

If Putin has drones, he has the option of taking out Taruta and
Kolomoyskiy. If Putin lets Washington retain the Russian provinces of
eastern Ukraine, he will have demonstrated a weakness that Washington
will exploit. Washington will exploit the weakness to the point that
Washington forces Putin to war.

In the days following the Ukraine coup d’Etat of February 23,
leading to the ousting of a duly elected president, Wall Street and the
IMF–in liaison with the US Treasury and the European Commission in
Brussels– had already set the stage for the outright takeover of
Ukraine’s monetary system. The EuroMaidan protests leading up to “regime
change” and the formation of an interim government were followed by
purges within key ministries and government bodies.

Stepan Kubiv is a member of Parliament of the Rightist Batkivshchyna “Fatherland” faction in the Rada led by the acting Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk
(founded by Yulia Tymoshenko in March 1999). He previously headed
Kredbank, a Ukrainian financial institution largely owned by EU capital,
with some 130 branches throughout Ukraine. Ukraine Central Bank Promises Liquidity To Local Banks, With One Condition,

Kubic is no ordinary bank executive. He was one of the first field “commandants” of the EuroMaidan riots alongside Andriy Parubiy co-founder of the Neo-Nazi Social-National Party of Ukraine (subsequently renamed Svoboda) and Dimitry Yarosh, leader of the Right Sector Brown Shirts, which now has the status of a political party. Kubiv was in the Maidan square
addressing protesters on February 18, at the very moment when armed
Right Sector thugs under the helm of Dmitry Yarosh were raiding the parliament building. A
few days later, upon the establishment of the interim government,
Stepan Kubiv was put in charge of negotiations with Wall Street and the
IMF.

The new Minister of Finance Aleksandr Shlapak [left] is a political crony of Viktor Yushchenko
–a long-time protegé of the IMF who was spearheaded into the presidency
following the 2004 “Colored Revolution”. Shlapak held key positions in
the office of the presidency under Yushchenko as well as at the National
Bank of Ukraine (NBU). In 2010, upon Yushchenko’s defeat, Aleksandr
Shlapak joined a shadowy Bermuda based offshore
financial outfit IMG International Ltd (IMG), holding the position of
Vice President. Based in Hamilton, Bermuda, IMG specialises in “captive
insurance management”, reinsurance and “risk transfer.”

Minister of Finance Aleksandr Shlapak works in close liaison with Pavlo Sheremeto,
the newly appointed Minister of Economic Development and Trade, who
upon his appointment called for “deregulation, fully fledged and across
the board”, requiring –as demanded in previous negotiations by the IMF–
the outright elimination of subsidies on fuel, energy and basic food
staples.

Another key appointment is that of Ihor Shvaika [right], a member of the Neo-Nazi Svoboda Party, to the position of Minister of Agrarian Policy and
Food. Headed by an avowed follower of World War II Nazi collaborator
Stepan Bandera [see image below], this ministry not only oversees the
agricultural sector, it also decides on issues pertaining to subsidies
and the prices of basic food staples.

The new Cabinet has stated that the country is prepared for socially
“painful” but necessary reforms. In December 2013, a 20 billion dollar
deal with the IMF had already been contemplated alongside the
controversial EU-Ukraine Association Agreement. Yanukovych decided to
turn it down. One of the requirements of the IMF was that “household subsidies for gas be reduced once again by 50%”.

“Other onerous IMF requirements included cuts to
pensions, government employment, and the privatization (read: let
western corporations purchase) of government assets and property.
It is therefore likely that the most recent IMF deal currently in
negotiation, will include once again major reductions in gas subsidies,
cuts in pensions, immediate government job cuts, as well as other
reductions in social spending programs in the Ukraine.” (voice of russia.com March 21, 2014)

Economic Surrender: Unconditional Acceptance of IMF Demands by Western Puppet Government

Shortly after his instatement, the interim (puppet) prime minister Arseny Yatsenyuk casually dismissed the need to negotiate with the IMF. Prior to the conduct of negotiations pertaining to a draft agreement, Yatsenyuk
had already called for an unconditional acceptance of the IMF package:
“We have no other choice but to accept the IMF offer”. Yatsenyk intimated that Ukraine will “accept whatever offer the IMF and the EU made” (voice of russia.com March 21, 2014)

In surrendering to the IMF, Yatsenyuk was fully aware that the
proposed reforms would brutally impoverish millions of people, including
those who protested in Maidan. The actual timeframe for the implementation of the IMF’s “shock
therapy” has not yet been firmly established. In all likelihood, the
regime will attempt to delay the more ruthless social impacts of the
macroeconomic reforms until after the May 25 presidential elections
(assuming that these elections will take place).

The text of the IMF agreement is likely to be detailed and specific,
particularly with regard to State assets earmarked for privatization. Henry Kissinger and Condoleeza Rice, according to Bloomberg are among
key individuals in the US who are acting (in a non-official capacity)
in tandem with the IMF, the Kiev government, in consultation with the
White House and the US Congress.

The IMF Mission to Kiev

Immediately upon the instatement of the new Finance Minister and NBU
governor, a request was submitted to the IMF’s Managing director. An IMF fact finding mission headed by the Director of the IMF’s European Department Rez Moghadam was rushed to Kiev:

The above statement is wrought with hypocrisy. In practice, the IMF
does not wield “sound economic governance” nor does it protect the
vulnerable. It impoverishes entire populations, while providing
“prosperity” to a small corrupt and subservient political and economic
elite.

IMF “economic medicine” while contributing to the enrichment of a
social minority, invariably triggers economic instability and mass
poverty, while providing a “social safety net” to the external
creditors. To sell its reform package, the IMF relies on media
propaganda as well as persistent statements by “economic experts” and
financial analysts which provide authority to the IMF’s macroeconomic
reforms.

The unspoken objective behind IMF interventionism is to destabilize
sovereign governments and literally break up entire national economies.
This is achieved through the manipulation of key macroeconomic policy
instruments as well as the outright rigging of financial markets,
including the foreign exchange market.

To reach its unspoken goals, the IMF-World Bank –often in
consultation with the US Treasury and the State Department–, will exert
control over key appointments including the Minister of Finance, the
Central Bank governor as well as senior officials in charge of the
country’s privatization program. These key appointments will require the
(unofficial) approval of the “Washington Consensus” prior to the
conduct of negotiations pertaining to a multibillion IMF bailout
agreement. Beneath the rhetoric, in the real World of money and credit, the IMF has several related operational objectives:

1) to facilitate the collection of debt
servicing obligations, while ensuring that the country remains indebted
and under the control of its external creditors.

2) to exert on behalf of the country’s
external creditors full control over the country’s monetary policy, its
fiscal and budgetary structures,

3) to revamp social programs, labor laws, minimum wage legislation, in accordance with the interests of Western capital

While the privatization program ensures the transfer of State assets into the hands of foreign investors, the
IMF program also includes provisions geared towards the destabilization
of the country’s privately owned business conglomerates. A
concurrent “break up” plan entitled “spin-off” as well as a “bankruptcy
program” are often implemented with a view to triggering the
liquidation, closing down or restructuring of a large number of
nationally owned private and public enterprises.

The “spin off” procedure –which was imposed on South Korea under the
December 1997 IMF bailout agreement– required the break up of several of
Korea’s powerful chaebols (business conglomerates) into smaller
corporations, many of which were then taken over by US, EU and Japanese
capital.. Sizeable banking interests as well highly profitable
components of Korea’s high tech industrial base were transferred or sold
off at rock bottom prices to Western capital. (Michel Chossudovsky, The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order, Global Research, Montreal, 2003, Chapter 22).

These staged bankruptcy programs ultimately seek to destroy national
capitalism. In the case of Ukraine, they would selectively target the
business interests of the oligarchs, opening the door for the takeover
of a sizeable portion of Ukraine’s private sector by EU and US
corporations. The conditionalities contained in the IMF agreement would
be coordinated with those contained in the controversial EU-Ukraine
Association agreement, which the Yanukovych government refused to sign.

Ukraine’s Spiraling External Debt

Ukraine’s external debt is of the order of $140 billion. In consultations with the US Treasury and the EU, the IMF aid package is to be of the order of 15 billion dollars. Ukraine’s outstanding short-term debt is of the order of $65 billion, more than four times the amount promised by the IMF.

The Central Bank’s foreign currency reserves have literally dried up. In February, according to the NUB, Ukraine’s
foreign-currency reserves were of the order of a meagre US$13.7
billion, its Special Drawing Rights with the IMF were of the order of
US$16.1 million, its gold reserves US$1.81 billion. There
were unconfirmed reports that Ukraine’s gold had been confiscated and
airlifted to New York, for “safe-keeping” under the custody of the New
York Federal Reserve Bank.

Under the bailout, the IMF –acting on behalf of Ukraine’s US and EU
creditors– lends money to Ukraine which is already earmarked for debt
repayment. The money is transferred to the creditors. The loan is “fictitious money”. Not one dollar of this money will enter Ukraine. The package is not intended to support economic growth. Quite the opposite:
Its main purpose is to collect the outstanding short term debt, while
precipitating the destabilization of Ukraine’s economy and financial
system.

The fundamental principle of usury is that the creditor comes to the
rescue of the debtor: “I cannot pay my debts, No problem my son, I will
lend you the money and with the money I lend you, you will pay me back”.

The rescue rope thrown to Kiev by the IMF and the
European Union is in reality a ball and chain. Ukraine’s external debt,
as documented by the World Bank, increased tenfold in ten years and
exceeds 135 billion dollars. In interests alone, Ukraine must pay about
4.5 billion dollars a year. The new loans will only serve to increase
the external debt thus obliging Kiev to “liberalize” its economy even
more, by selling to corporations what remains to be privatized.

According to IMF’s managing director Christine Lagarde the bailout is
intended to address the issue of poverty and social inequality. In
actuality what it does is to increase the levels of indebtedness, while
essentially handing over the reins of macro-economic reform and monetary
policy to the Bretton Woods Institutions, acting on behalf of Wall
Street.

The bailout agreement will include the imposition of drastic
austerity measures which in all likelihood will trigger further social
chaos and economic dislocation. It’s called “policy based lending”,
namely the granting of money earmarked to reimburse the creditors, in
exchange for the IMF’s “bitter economic medicine” in the form of a menu
of neoliberal policy reforms. “Short-term pain for long term gain” is
the motto of the Washington based Bretton Woods institutions.

Loan “conditionalities” will be imposed –including drastic austerity
measures– -which will serve to impoverish the Ukrainian population
beyond bounds in a country which has been under IMF ministrations for
more than 20 years. While the Maidan movement was manipulated, tens of
thousands of people protested they wanted a new life, because their
standard of living had collapsed as a result of the neoliberal policies
applied by successive governments, including that of president
Yanukovych. Little did they realize that the protest movement supported
by Wall Street, the US State Department and the National Endowment for
Democracy (NED) was meant to usher in a new phase of economic and
social destruction.

History of IMF Ministrations in Ukraine

In 1994 under the presidency of Leonid Kuchma, an IMF package was imposed on Ukraine. Viktor Yushchenko
–who later became president following the 2004 Colored Revolution– had
been appointed head of the newly-formed National Bank of Ukraine (NBU).
Yushchenko was praised by the Western financial media as a “daring
reformer”; he was among the main architects of the IMF’s 1994 reforms
which served to destabilize Ukraine’s national economy. When he ran in
the 2004 elections against Yanukovych, he was supported by various
foundations including the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). He was
Wall Street’s preferred candidate.

Ukraines’ 1994 IMF package was finalized behind closed doors at the
Madrid 50 years anniversary Summit of the Bretton Woods institutions. It
required the Ukrainian government to abandon State controls over the
exchange rate leading to an massive collapse of the currency. Yushchenko
played a key role in negotiating and implementing the 1994 agreement as
well as creating a new Ukrainian national currency, which resulted in a
dramatic plunge in real wages:

Yushchenko as Head of the Central Bank was responsible
for deregulating the national currency under the October 1994 “shock
treatment”:

The price of bread increased overnight by 300 percent,

electricity prices by 600 percent,

public transportation by 900 percent.

the standard of living tumbled

The IMF-World Bank had destroyed Ukraine’s ‘bread basket”. By 1998, the deregulation of the grain market, the hikes in the price
of fuel and the liberalisation of trade resulted in a decline in the
production of grain by 45 percent in relation to its 1986-90 level. The
collapse in livestock production, poultry and dairy products was even
more dramatic. (See http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/scr/2003/cr03174.pdf). The cumulative decline in GDP resulting from the IMF sponsored reforms was in excess of 60 percent from 1992 to 1995.

Today an outspoken hedge fund manager out of Hong Kong stunned King
World News when he said that the entire Ukrainian gold hoard may have
just secretly been flown from Ukraine to the United States. William
Kaye, who 25 years ago worked for Goldman Sachs in mergers and acquisitions,
also spoke about the incredible implications of this astonishing
development. Below is what Kaye had to say in this powerful interview.

Kaye: “There are now reports coming from Ukraine
that all of the Ukrainian gold has been airlifted, at 2 AM Ukrainian
time, out of the main airport, Boryspil Airport, in Kiev, and is being
flown to New York -- the presumable destination being the New York
Fed. Now that’s 33 tons of
gold which is worth somewhere between $1.5 billion - $2 billion. That
would amount to a very nice down payment to the $5 billion that
Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland boasted that the United
States has already spent in their efforts to destabilize Ukraine, and
put in place their own unelected government.”

Eric King: “Whether the
United States is taking down Saddam Hussein in Iraq, or Muammar Gaddafi
in Libya, there always seems to be gold at the end of the rainbow, which
the U.S. then appropriates.”

Kaye: “That’s
a good point, Eric. The United States installed a former banker in
Ukraine who is very friendly to the West. He is also a guy with central
bank experience. This would have been his first major decision to
transport that gold out of Ukraine to the United States.

You may
recall that allegedly the logistical requirements prevented the New
York Fed from returning the 300 tons of gold the United States stores
for Germany back to Germany. After a year of waiting, the New York Fed
only sent Germany 5 tons of gold. So only 5 tons of gold was sent from
the Fed to Germany, and it wasn’t even the 5 tons that had been
originally stored with the Fed.Even
the Bundesbank has admitted that the gold sent to them by the New York
Fed had to be melted down and tested for purity because it wasn’t
Germany’s original bars. So how is it, since logistical requirements
are supposedly such a major issue, that in one airlift, assuming this
report is accurate, all the gold Ukraine possessed in their vault was
taken out of Ukraine and delivered to the New York Fed? I think
anybody with any active brain cells knows that just like Germany,
Ukraine will have to wait a very long time, and very likely will never
see that gold again. Meaning, that gold is gone.”

The US has been selective in supporting the self-determination of
nations. It continues to dismiss Crimea's choice to reunite with Russia,
while at the same time backs the coup in Kiev. And the idea is hardly
new for Washington.

The current situation in Ukraine has something in common with the
one in Colombia, James Petras, a political analyst and Professor
(Emeritus) at Binghamton University, New York, believes. The
common part is the US role in what’s going on in both countries,
he suggests in his op-ed, recently published at the website of
Montreal-based Centre for Research on Globalization.

“The two paths to 21st century empire-building-via-proxies
are illustrated through the violent seizure of power in the
Ukraine by a US-backed junta and the electoral gains of the
US-backed Colombian war lord, Alvaro Uribe,” Petras says.
“By rendering democratic processes and peaceful popular
reforms impossible and by overthrowing independent,
democratically elected governments, Washington is making wars and
violent upheavals inevitable.”

The US has quite a history of meddling in Colombia since
encouraging the breakaway of Panama, in the early 20th century.
The US was then able to negotiate favorable conditions for the
creation of the Panama Canal. The most recent example comes from
2013, when The Washington Post published an article revealing
that the CIA actively helped the Colombian government to locate
and kill guerrilla leaders.

While preaching non-interference to Russia, Washington has been
very active in showing its support for, first, protesters in Kiev
and then to the coup-appointed government. The US participation
in events in Ukraine did not confine itself to distributing
snacks to rally participants, or friendly gestures of support.

“We’ve invested over 5 billion dollars to assist Ukraine in
these and other goals that will ensure a secure, prosperous, and
democratic Ukraine,” Victoria Nuland, Assistant US Secretary
of State for Europe and Eurasia said in December, 2013. The announcement has drawn criticism.

“The West spent 5 billion dollars destabilizing Ukraine. This
is something that is a mess that’s put on Russia’s doorstep by
the West,” a US writer and activist, Daniel Patrick Welch,
believes. International law professor at Georgetown University, Daoud
Khairallah, says there are many more examples of the US meddling
in the internal affairs of other countries. “The Middle East is an example,” he told RT. “What
is known as the Arab Spring is method of self-destruction,
achieving political goals through having societies destroy
themselves.”

Quite a number of post WWII coups are believed to have been
US-assisted, like the one in Iran in 1953. Prime Minister
Mohammed Mossadegh, who sought to turn Iran into a full democracy
was ousted with the help of the US and replaced by the Shah, who
then ruled as absolute monarch for the next 26 years.

"It was the potential... to leave Iran open to Soviet
aggression - at a time when the Cold War was at its height and
when the United States was involved in an undeclared war in Korea
against forces supported by the USSR and China - that compelled
the United States [REDACTED] in planning and executing TPAJAX
[the code name of the coup operation]," reads the CIA
document, declassified in 2013 and cited by the Foreign Policy.

Similarly the US’s hand is seen in the 1954 coup in Guatemala,
the in the Congo 1960, in South Vietnam 1963, in Brazil 1964, and
Chile in 1973. Latin Americans have always believed themselves to be a major
target of the US over the years. A popular joke there says:
“Why will there never be a coup in the US? Because there’s no
US Embassy in Washington.”

“We have examples of outside intrusion in the internal
politics of states like Mexico, Guatemala, Panama, Nicaragua,
Haiti, Dominican Republic, and Grenada,” the late Venezuelan
president, Hugo Chavez, said in one of his RT interviews.
“Repeated attempts of a coup in Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil,
Ecuador, and Bolivia. There was no coup in the 150-year-old
history of Latin America, that the US government did not apply
its hand to.”

For more opinions on the role of the US in “regime changes”
throughout the world watch RT's Anastasia Churkina’s report.

The Armenian political elite and the general
public are divided on the account of the Kiev events. The main question,
however, is whether the Ukrainian revolution may spill out to Armenia.

In the evening of February 20, in the Armenian city of Spitak,
several young activists appeared on one of the central squares, named
after Viktor Yanukovich. They covered the plaque that read “Viktor
Yanukovich square” with a self-made sign with the name “Sergey Nigoyan
square”.

Sergey Nigoyan, an ethnic Armenian from Eastern Ukraine, was one of
the first victims of the clashes in Kiev, allegedly killed by a
pro-government sniper on January 22. As for Yanukovich, he was the head of a construction company that
took part in the reconstruction of earthquake-hit northern Armenia
during the last years of the Soviet Unions, and the square was named
after him a sign of gratitude for this work.

Of course, there are doubts as to whether Yanukovich’s role in the
reconstruction would have been so highly appreciated had he not become
an influential politician: the square was named after him in 2008, when
he was already the leader of the Regions’ Party in Ukraine.

Arayik
Harutyunyan, member of a recently formed “Civil Contract”
political movement, says that he had been thinking about the symbolic
renaming of the square for months, after he heard about the first cases
of violence against protesters. When on February 20 the news spread
about the bloodshed in Kiev, he had no more doubts. “I do not think
Yanukovich deserves a square named after him”, Arayik
explains.

“Thousands of people helped Armenia after the earthquake,
including many Ukrainians, but the square was named after Yanukovich...
this was a purely political decision”.

The choice of Sergey
Nigoyan’s name was not a coincidence: for many
young Armenians he became a symbol of liberty and resistance. Nigoyan
was not the only ethnic Armenian among the victims: Georgi
Hyrutiunian, from the western Ukrainian town of Rivne, was killed on
February 20, when the clashes escalated.

People power or conspiracy?

However,
not everyone in Armenia shares positive views about the Ukrainian
revolutionaries. Many Armenians are wary of the Ukrainian events, seeing
them as a
showdown between Russian and Western secret services, rather than a
popular revolution. Russian language sources, both on television and
Internet, remain the
main source of information about the events in the Post-Soviet space
for the majority of Armenians.

Therefore, the image of chaos in Ukraine that the Russian state media
has been promoting, has influenced the perceptions of the Ukrainian
events in Armenia. Some Armenians even share Moscow’s view of Ukrainian revolutionaries as “fascists” and “criminals”.

Even
after Nigoyan’s death captured the attention of Armenian media,
some of the commentary aired the view that Nigoyan’s death was in vain,
since he had found himself on the wrong side of the barricades. This
ambivalence about how to react to the Ukrainian events seems to
go up to the highest echelons of the Armenian government.

On the one
hand, they do not want to displease the Russian authorities, but simply
subscribing to Moscow’s view would further complicate relations with
Western partners. Some pro-government figures openly embraced the Yanukovich's version
of events: thus, pro-government member of parliament Artashes Geghamyan
accused “outside forces” of using “technologies of destruction” in
Ukraine.

Higher-level government officials have been more careful in their
comments, preferring to avoid the topic, especially after the defeat of
Yanukovich became obvious.

When in the National Assembly the opposition suggested a minute of
silence in memory of the Ukrainian protesters killed during the clashes,
the parliament speaker agreed, but he added that the deputies should
honor all victims, including those from the police force. The opposition is more outspoken about the Ukrainian events, pointing
to similarities between Armenia and Ukraine, and implying that Armenian
government may repeat the fate of Yanukovich.

However, opposition
politicians are also careful to tone down their comments when it comes
to the geopolitical rivalry between Russia and the West, as no political
force wants to come off as anti-Russian.

Armenia and the Ukraine: so similar, yet so different

Of
course, the biggest question is whether the Ukrainian revolution may
spill out to Armenia. Similarities between Ukraine and Armenia are
plenty: both lack energy
resources and are heavily dependent on foreign supplies, both were hit
hard by the financial crisis and never fully recovered, both have a
serious corruption problem. In both countries, the government has been
accused of election fraud
and other authoritarian tendencies, but both countries have a degree of
political and media freedom, which puts them ahead of typical
post-Soviet autocracies like Belarus.

However, there are also important differences.

The Armenian opposition has been in disarray since the presidential
elections of 2013, when, in spite of claims of election fraud, the
opposition failed to unite, and post-election protests ended in a
fiasco. Also, given Armenia’s geopolitical situation, the European option,
which mobilized at least part of protesters in Ukraine, seems relatively
feeble for Armenia. Finally, Armenia is involved into an ongoing conflict with Azerbaijan
and has unresolved issues with Turkey, and against that background an
internal stand-off of the kind that happened in Ukraine would be
extremely risky for Armenia.

With all that in mind, it is clear why many Armenians are skeptical
that the Ukrainian events will have any substantial influence on
Armenia. However, some disagree. Poet Marine Petrosyan, who is also well known for her political
activism, says “I remember 1987, when protests had started in various
places all over the USSR, and many people in Armenia were saying that
Armenians are different, there is no way they will rise up against the
system… Only a few months later the Karabakh movement started, and
hundreds of thousands were on the street protesting”.

Arshak, a small business owner from Yerevan, says he was shocked by
the casualties in Kiev: “I don’t want something like that to happen in
Armenia and I don’t think it’s possible”. But, he says, “Armenians need
to do something in order to remind the government that it is supposed to
serve the people, as Ukrainians had done… Whoever comes to power in
Ukraine, all those deaths would not be in vain: from now on, people in
power will realize that sooner or later they will have to answer for
what they are doing”.

If
anyone tries to convince you that the Cold War is over, take that
statement with a grain of salt. The Cold War is continuing, if not
intensifying. After the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the West rushed
in to fill the power vacuum left in the absence of a central Soviet
regime, by engaging the newly-emancipated Eastern European countries
into the European Union and NATO structures. It even drew the line in
the sand for Russia after dismembering former Yugoslavia.

In
2008, Moscow drew its own line in the sand by attacking and
“liberating” parts of Georgia. Ukraine remained the center of a
tug-of-war between Russia and the West, shifting allegiance at least
three times. The Orange Revolution of 2004 brought to power Victor
Yushchenko and Yulia Timoshenko, which nudged the country
toward the West. By 2010, the erstwhile allies had
become bitter enemies and during a three-way presidential election,
former Prime Minister Victor Yanukovich won, shifting the country back
towards Moscow.

Thus
the country teetered between the two tectonic centers of power until
the recent revolt emerged at Kiev’s Maidan, which brought down
Yanukovich’s administration. He had just struck a deal with the
opposition, with the blessing of the foreign ministers of France, the UK
and Poland. The agreement called for the revival of the 2004
constitution limiting the presidential powers and setting a December
date for the election. The Maidan protestors, however, did not heed the
agreement and the government fell. Yanukovich was deposed by the
Ukrainian Rada (Parliament), which
appointed Alexander Turchinov as interim president.

Naturally,
these
developments were filtered through different and opposing lenses; for
the West, the will of the Ukrainian people had won, while for the
Russians, street gangs and thugs had usurped power through violence. A
pivotal role was played in this transition by Arsen Avakov, minister of
the interior, an ethnic Armenian. There is no doubt that the tug-of-war
will continue. Susan Rice, President Obama’s national security chief,
has warned Moscow against any military intervention.Ukraine is a vast
country with a population of 46 million. Seventy percent of its trade is
with Russia. There is a precedent that Moscow has interrupted the flow
of gas to Ukraine when things did not go to its liking.

The
eastern regions of the country are the most industrialized and are
populated by Russian-speaking and Russophile Ukrainians, who have
already been agitating. The Crimean peninsula, birthplace of Hovhannes
Aivazovsky, by the way, is predominantly populated by Russians.
Incidentally, while former Politburo member Heydar Aliyev accused any
Armenian who sought the return of Karabagh and Nakhichevan as
reactionary and nationalist, Nikita Khrushchov, an ethnic Ukrainian,
annexed Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 and no one accused him of nationalism.
Of course, at that time, border adjustments within the Soviet Union did
not have the same political significance as they will have today
because the Russian Black Sea fleet is based in Crimea.

A
hostile neighbor with a potential of joining NATO will certainly
irritate policy planners in Moscow, compelling them to take remedial
action now before any further deterioration of the situation. That
reaction may lead the country into a partition. Political analyst Igor
Muradian believes that “there will be actual federalization while
maintaining Ukraine as a single internationally-recognized state and at
the same time, the issue of the state budget, utilities and mobility of
the people, foreign relations, army and law enforcement agencies will
be addressed. At the same time, the process of separating Crimea from
Ukraine will begin, which is apparently inevitable.”

There
are striking parallels between Ukraine and Armenia, especially since
both made their U-turn to join Russia’s Customs Union, at the same time
interrupting their negotiations with the EU, ostensibly under Russian
pressure. Before these events, Moscow had pledged $15 billion worth of
aid to Ukraine. Now the new leaders believe that Ukraine needs $60-70
billion to avoid an economic
collapse, it is
doubtful if Moscow will abide by its early pledge. The US and EU have
made some vague promises, which may or may not meet the expectations of
the new leaders.

In
Armenia, there is no love lost for the Russians who are increasingly
treating the country in a cavalier manner. Armenian political groups
organized a solidarity unit with Maidan and even travelled to Kiev to
support the protestors. Political pundits are comparing the March 1,
2008 Armenian demonstrations which claimed 10 lives with Kiev’s Maidan.
All opposition parties are wishing and trying to enact the repeat
performance of Maidan in Armenia. Fortunately, or unfortunately, the
opposition is so splintered that no two groups can agree on any common
ground. The
well-oiled media is entirely financed by foreign governments and
agencies and they are trying hard to incite anti-Russian sentiments.
Armenia’s well-being is the least of their worries. They finance the
media for their own selfish purposes. Many starving journalists are
serving these foreign agencies for their own survival, oblivious of
their cumulative impact on the fate of the country.

Any
veteran or novice in politics there begins his rhetoric with calls for
regime change. But modern history has demonstrated time and again that
any change will only rout one set of oligarchs and bring new ones to
power. Corruption is endemic in all former Soviet republics. No country
in the region can
remain sanitized as long as they continue their former economic and
business relations with each other. Georgia, the most Western-oriented
state in the Caucasus, had trumpeted loudly that it had eradicated
corruption under Mikheil Saakashvili, that the rule of law had become
paramount. Former Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream
Party rose to power, and last week former Prime Minister Ivane
Merabishvili was sentence to a five-year prison term for corruption.

The
Orange Revolution had catapulted Yulia Timoshenko to power in Ukraine
and she landed in jail for corruption. Even Greece, the cradle of
democracy and civilization, and a member of the European Union, is
plagued with corruption. This means that
association with Europe alone is not a panacea. Corruption is a
genuine cause for concern in Armenia. It has to be criticized. It has
to be eradicated, but only for its own sake so that the lives of its
people improve and not in order to feed the agenda of foreign powers who
have a vested interest in Armenia without a strong central government.
Events in Ukraine shook the world and its echoes reverberate more in
Armenia, having the same predicament. But a repeat performance of Maidan
will only bring chaos.

National
Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) of the US Department of Energy
plans to replace the existing arsenal of nuclear weapons at the Turkish
base of Incirlik with upgraded bombs. Incirlik holds about 60-70 items
of this type of ammunition, the Haberturk agency reports. This version
is designated B61-12, which is being developed
within the framework of the
2010 NNSA project to replace the outdated version of B61. The main
improvement is a modified tail section, which enables active targeting,
the function the previous B61 lacks. NNSA has conducted the first tests,
which were evaluated as successful. Practical use of the new bombs
would be possible in 2017. At present, the European nuclear arsenals of
the United States are located at bases in Belgium, Germany, the
Netherlands, Italy and Turkey. It is supposed, that there is a total of
about 300 B61 nuclear bombs in these countries. The US and the UK
armies have been using the Turkish base of Incirlic for operational,
strategic and logistical needs since 1955. It is located a few
kilometers to the east of the large Mediterranean city of Adana.

As Russian president Vladimir
Putin signed a treaty on Tuesday making Crimea part of Russia, a
little-known region in neighboring Moldova has also pleaded to join the
country. Russian
loyalists in the breakaway region of Trans-Dniester, which shares a
border with Ukraine, asked the parliament in Russia to write new laws
that would allow them to join the

The
Trans-Dniester region split from Moldova around 1990 and made a
failed attempt at independence in 2006, when it held a referendum that
was unrecognized internationally. The region did not want to split from
the Soviet Union at the time of its collapse and has now requested unity
with Russia.

Otilia
Dhand, vice president at advisory and intelligence firm Teneo
Intelligence said Trans-Dniester has been asking to join the Russian
Federation for two decades, so now is an opportune moment to ask again.
Dhand said up until now the Kremlin had shown little interest in
absorbing the region as it offers little strategic and economic
benefits.

"There are
550,000 citizens of citizens of Trans-Dniester who mostly also claim
other citizenships. There are about 150,000 of them that claim dual
citizenship with Russia and many others claim Ukrainian citizenship or
Romanian so it is kind of a mixed picture," Dhand told CNBC.

"Russia has roughly 1,000 soldiers based there and also some ammunition
and equipment that comes with it. They are not such a substantial force
as they are in Crimea and Russia does not have common borders with
Trans-Dniester, so it would be difficult to service as a territory," she
said.

"If they were interested
in tactically taking it over - it would just really be for show. Should
Russia choose to take Trans-Dniester over, it would be quite
intimidating for Ukraine," she added.

Speaker of the high council, Mikheil Burla sent a written address to a
speaker in Russia's Duma, the lower house, asking him to consider
legislation that would allow the non-recognized republic to become part
of Russia, according to media reports. The President of Moldova Nicolae Timofti has warned that any move to
enable the mainly Russian speaking region to join Russia would be a
"mistake".

"This
is an illegal body which has taken no decision on inclusion into
Russia," Reuters cited Timofti as saying at a news conference. "If
Russia makes a move to satisfy such proposals, it will be making a
mistake," he said.

Russia's decision to sign a treaty to annex the Black Sea peninsula of
Crimea, after a referendum held under Russian military occupation showed
overwhelming support for the move, has further damaged relations with
the West.

The United States and the EU imposed travel bans and asset freezes
against a number of officals from Russia and Ukraine following Sunday's
referendum and U.S. Vice President Joe Biden called Moscow's action a
"land grab". Russian Foreign
Minister Sergei Lavrov told U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in a
telephone call that such sanctions were unacceptable and threatened
"consequences", without going into detail.

Trans-Dniestrian citizens: A 'mixed picture'

Trans-Dniester is recognized as part of Moldova by the U.N. rather than
as an independent state, but the region is self-governed and runs its
own institutions. Moldova has a population of approximately 3.56
million. Crimea has 2.3 million people compared to Trans-Dniester, the
thin strip of land between the Dniester river and the Ukraine border,
which is populated by approximately 550,000 people and has its own
currency, the Trans-Dniester rouble.

At the time of the collapse of the USSR, Moldova as a constitutive
republic of the USSR wanted independence but Trans-Dniester wanted to
stay with Russia. There was a short, but bloody war in 1992, but the
issue has never been fully resolved.

Teneo's Dhand said many citizens living in the region have as many as
three passports: a Trans-Dniesterian one which is not recognized, a
Russian one and potentially one other from "whichever other country
allows them to have one. So it is complicated to define each and every
person, where they belong,"she said. The referendum held in Trans-Dniester in 2006 resulted in about 97
percent of the population voting for independence and to join Russia.